Assisted reproductive technologies and abortion prompt serious questions about how we should understand the complex relationship between money, markets, choice, and the care relationship. This essay defines "patient" and "consumer," and then describes how they are less important than their attributes. Then it describes theories of commodification and consumption in reproductive contexts and the...

The concept of the Benchmarks of Fairness was tried in Thailand before the big reform of universal coverage policy in 2001. The first phase of the Benchmarks in 1999 involved the analysis of the national health reform proposal as well as the analysis of ongoing field trials of health reforms in two provinces. Though the participants were predominately health personnel, the results suggested the...

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...

BACKGROUND With the medical reform, the function of community health centres emerged to be more important recently in China. However, the health service capabilities were tremendously different between metropolitan cities and small cities. This study aims to clarify the level of job satisfaction of Chinese community health workers between a metropolitan (Shenyang) and a small city (Benxi) in Li...

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...