This study aims to examine the inter-district and inter-village variation of utilization of health services for institutional births in EAG states in presence of rural health program and availability of infrastructures. District Level Household Survey-III (2007-08) data on delivery care and facility information was used for the purpose. Bivariate results examined the utilization pattern by stat...

Individuals with health insurance use more health care. One reason is that health care is cheaper for the insured. Additionally, having insurance can encourage unhealthy behavior via moral hazard. Previous work studying the effect of health insurance on medical utilization has mostly ignored behavioral changes due to having health insurance, and how that in turn affects medical utilization. Thi...

BACKGROUND As an important outcome of the health system, equity in health service utilization has attracted an increasing amount of attention in the literature on health reform in China in recent years. The poor, who frequently require more services, are often the least able to pay, while the wealthy utilize disproportionately more services although they have less need. Whereas equity in health...

BACKGROUND The increasing utilization of the internet has provided a better opportunity for people to search online for health information, which was not easily available to them in the past. Studies reported that searching on the internet for health information may potentially influence an individual's decision making to change her health-seeking behaviors. OBJECTIVE The objectives of this s...

For the regression model Yi = m(xi) + σ(xi)2i, i = 1, . . . , m, we propose a new nonparametric diagnostic test for checking the constancy of the conditional variance function σ(x). The proposed test does not assume a known parametric form for the conditional mean function m(x). The test statistic is inspired by recent asymptotic theory in analysis of variance when the number of factor levels i...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES A commonly cited explanation of how racial discrimination impacts health is the biopsychosocial model. However, the biopsychosocial model does not allow for the effects of perceived provider discrimination on health behavior and utilization. In fact, researchers have directed relatively little attention toward the direct and indirect effects of perceived provider discr...