BACKGROUND Inequality in health services access and utilization are influenced by out-of-pocket health expenditures in many low and middle-income countries (LMICs). Various antecedents such as social factors, poor health and economic factors are proposed to direct the choice of health care service use and incurring out-of-pocket payments. We investigated the association of these factors with ou...

OBJECTIVE To provide the international community with an estimate of the amount of financial resources needed to scale up malaria control to reach international goals, including allocations by country, year and intervention as well as an indication of the current funding gap. METHODS A costing model was used to estimate the total costs of scaling up a set of widely recommended interventions, ...

Do policy conditions attached to International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending programmes have an impact on government health expenditure in developing countries? Yes, according to a large body of literature (see Kentikelenis, 2017), and our recent article (Stubbs et al., 2017). We systematically reviewed IMF loan agreements and staff reports to generate a database of “binding” conditions that coul...

How do International Monetary Fund (IMF) policy reforms-so-called 'conditionalities'-affect government health expenditures? We collected archival documents on IMF programmes from 1995 to 2014 to identify the pathways and impact of conditionality on government health spending in 16 West African countries. Based on a qualitative analysis of the data, we find that IMF policy reforms reduce fiscal ...

There has been recent controversy about whether aid directed specifically to health has caused recipient governments to reallocate their own funds to non-health areas. At the same time, general budget support (GBS) has been increasing. GBS allows governments to set their own priorities, but little is known about how these additional resources are subsequently used. This paper uses cross-country...

In a life-cycle model, a retiree faces stochastic health depreciation and chooses consumption, health expenditure, and the allocation of wealth between bonds, stocks, and housing. The model explains key facts about asset allocation and health expenditure across health status and age. The portfolio share in stocks is low overall and is positively related to health, especially for younger retiree...

BACKGROUND Social systems are dealing with the challenge of achieving fairness in the distribution of financial burden and protecting the risk of financial loss. The purpose of this paper is to present a trend analysis for the indicators related to fairness in healthcare's financial burden in rural and urban population of Iran during the eight years period of 2003 to 2010. METHODS We used the...

BACKGROUND During recent decades, increase in both health care expenditures and improvement of the awareness as well as health expectations have created some problems with regard to finance healthcare expenditures so that the issue of health financing by households has been determined as a major challenge in health sector. According to the definition by the World Health Organization, catastroph...

This article distributes the Health Care Financing Administration's (HCFA) estimates of 1995 personal health care expenditures (PHCE) according to sex, age, and diagnosis for each type of health care service. Aggregate and per capita expenditures are reported for 18 broad categories of disease classified according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9-CM). Special emphasis is g...

OBJECTIVES The objective of this study was to longitudinally examine the geographic distribution of physicians in Japan with adjustment for healthcare demand according to changes in population age structure. METHODS We examined trends in the number of physicians per 100 000 population in Japan's secondary medical areas (SMAs) from 2000 to 2014. Healthcare demand was adjusted using health expe...