BACKGROUND Shenzhen's rapid growth and urbanisation has attracted a large, mobile, migrant working population. This article explores health protection through the means of social health insurance between migrants and registrants and their point of access to healthcare. METHODS A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted in Shenzhen, with a random sample of 793 registered and 750 non-...

Today's preoccupation with cost shifting and cost reduction undermines physicians and patients. Instead, health care reform must focus on improving health and health care value for patients. We propose a strategy for reform that is market based but physician led. Physician leadership is essential. Improving the value of health care is something only medical teams can do. The right kind of compe...

This article describes and analyzes the U.S. health care legislation of 2010 by asking how far it was designed to move the U.S. system in the direction of practices in all other rich democracies. The enacted U.S. reform could be described, extremely roughly, as Japanese pooling with Swiss and American problems at American prices. Its policies are distinctive, yet nevertheless somewhat similar t...

forest and colleagues have persuasively made the case that policy capacity is a fundamental prerequisite to health reform. they offer a comprehensive life-cycle definition of policy capacity and stress that it involves much more than problem identification and option development. i would like to offer a canadian perspective. if we define health reform as re-orienting the health system from acut...

Series Editor's Note: This article provides a comprehensive look at many of the health policy issues related to children 3health insurance. It was originally written in April 1997 when the outcome of foderallegislation was unclear. Even though Congress has recently decided to increase health insurance coverage for children, however, the issues presented in this paper remain critically important...

OBJECTIVES In national and local discussions of health care reform, there is disagreement about whether a national health insurance plan should be mandatory or voluntary. This study describes characteristics of low- income people who were more likely or less likely to be covered by a voluntary plan. METHODS Survey data were available from an evaluation of Washington State's Basic Health Plan,...

~| y electing Democrat Harris Wofford B to the Senate over former Attorney General Richard T h o r n b u r g h in November 1991, the voters of Pennsylvania proved that healthcare reform is a politically salient issue. Policy analysts, amazed that Wofford's healthcare reform message was a key factor in his election, have debated during the past few months whether this was a fluke or the precurso...