background and objectives: pharmaceutical expenditures are responsible for a major part of health systems’ cost. according to the who’s statistics, iran is the first among the 20 countries in the world in terms of drug consumption. the first step in controlling consumption of a particular good is to identify factor inducing the relevant demands. hence, this study aimed to identify the pattern a...

BACKGROUND The popularity of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has led to a growing amount of research in this area. All the same little is known about the effects of these special treatments in every-day practice of primary care, delivered by general practitioners within the health insurance system. From 1994 to 2000 more than 20 German Company health insurances initiated the first ...

It is possible to model life contingency insurances with the lifecontingencies R package, which is capable of performing financial and actuarial mathematics calculations. Its functions permit one to determine both the expected value and the stochastic distribution of insured benefits. Therefore, life insurance coverage can be priced and portfolios risk-based capital requirements can be assessed...

Income redistribution in Germany is the result of combination of several redistribution instruments: There is a complex income tax law, different obligatory social insurances and supplementary benefits. This note estimates the income redistribution by quantile regression, using German EVS data. Two results are obtained: Income after redistribution is not everywhere increasing in income before r...

Occurrences and developments of claims are modelled as a marked point process. The individual claim consists of an occurrence time, two covariates, a reporting delay, and a process describing partial payments and settlement of the claim. Under certain likelihood assumptions the distribution of the process is described by 14 onedimensional components. The modelling is nonparametric Bayesian. The...

A new risk was born in the mid-1990s known as operational risk. Though its application varied by institutions Basel II for banks and Solvency 2 for insurances the idea stays the same. Firms are interested in operational risk because exposure can be fatal. Hence it has become one of the major risks of the financial sector. In this study, we are going to define operational risk in addition to its...

BACKGROUND In Germany, utilisation of ambulatory healthcare services is high compared with other countries: While a study based on the process data of German statutory health insurances showed an average of 17.1 physician-patient-contacts per year, the comparable figure for Norway is about five. The usual models of healthcare utilisation, such as Rosenstock's Health Belief Model and Andersen's ...

Herbal medicine (HM) is one of the most widely used Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) therapies throughout the world. The WHO has recognized HM as an essential component of primary healthcare. The aim of this study was to explore patients' attitudes towards using HM, their sources of information and the role of costs. Within a qualitative research approach, semi-standardized intervie...