In recent years, there have been observed increased costs of health care in Poland. The patient's out of pocket expenses on drug have grown too. To the above, the insurance companies have offered patients drug coverage insurance policies since recently. Drug insurance policy covers the cost of purchasing pharmaceutical products not reimbursed by the National Health Fund is a modern product on t...

Preface Reality provides many examples of something we call a search. Informally, we may have a goal (e.g., finding a lost key, a damaged light bulb, the shortest way to the next bus stop) and a set of possible actions to gain some information. All possible action needs some time, money, work etc., so that we want to calculate the expenses of our search strategy in order to minimize them. Due t...

Chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, associated with severe liver disease and cancer, affects 70 million people worldwide. New treatments with direct-acting-antivirals offer cure for about 95% of affected individuals; however, treatment costs may be prohibitive in both the poorest and richest nations. Opting for cure may require sacrificing essential household ass...

Kathleen Short is a senior research economist, in the Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, U.S. Census Bureau, [email protected]. Thesia I. Garner is a senior research economist in the Division of Price and Index Number Research, Bureau of Labor Statistics, [email protected]. The official measure of poverty in the United States has been in place since the 1960s and has served to i...

Although men and women have some similar challenges with regard to health insurance, women face unique barriers to becoming insured. More significantly, women have greater difficulty affording health care services even once they are insured. On average, women have lower incomes than men and therefore have greater difficulty paying premiums. Women also are less likely than men to have coverage t...

While the aged as a group have better access to health care since the inception of Medicare, there are subsets of the population that are still vulnerable to large out-of-pocket expenses. The focus of this analysis is on those segments of the Medicare population which are particularly vulnerable to access problems due to their personal characteristics. In particular, using data from the Nationa...

We propose a methodology to classify individuals into few but meaningful health groups by estimating panel Markov switching model that exploits rich information from household surveys. Using the HRS, we identify four persistent groups, depending on individual's physical and mental disabilities. Our classification outperforms existing measures at explaining entry in nursing homes, home care, out...