this study will provide detailed specification of those variables and determinants of unpredictable health expenditure in iran, and the requirements to reduce extensive effects of the factors affecting households' payments for health and other goods and services inappropriately.this study aims to identify measures of fair financing of health services and determinants of fair financing contribut...

PURPOSE To determine the effectiveness of verbal, written, and videotaped descriptions of cataract surgery on patients' understanding of the risks, benefits, and treatment alternatives. SETTING Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. DESIGN Randomized prospective study. METHODS Patients eligible for cataract surgery were randomized into 1 of 4 arms of the in...

OBJECTIVE A solid understanding of levels and trends of spending on cancer is important to evaluate whether our healthcare resources were wisely spent and to prioritize future resources for cancer treatment and prevention. However, studies on economic burden of cancers in China are scant and the results are inconsistent. METHODS The Chinese hospital information database and nearly 350 million...

BACKGROUND Aiming to align provider incentives toward improving quality and efficiency, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services is considering broader bundling of hospital and physician payments around episodes of inpatient surgery. Decisions about bundled payments would benefit from better information about how payments are currently distributed among providers of different perioperative...

In a recent article in this journal Simon-Tuval, Horev and Kaplan argue that in order to improve the protection of consumers there might be a need to impose a threshold on the medical loss ratio (MLR) for voluntary health insurance (VHI) in Israel [1]. Their argument is that VHI in Israel covers several essential services that are not covered by the mandatory benefits package due to budget cons...