BACKGROUND Utilization of healthcare in Ghana's novel National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) has been increasing since inception with associated high claims bill which threatens the scheme's financial sustainability. This paper investigates the presence of adverse selection by assessing the effect of healthcare utilization and frequency of use on NHIS renewal. METHOD Routine enrolment and ut...

Many emerging market economy (EME) financial crises in the 1990s quickly spread to other countries. By contrast, immediate spillovers from the Argentina crisis in 2001/2002 appear to have been much more limited. Why do some crises spillover and others do not? In this paper we stress the joint importance of intra-EME linkages, related country-specific vulnerabilities and investor behaviour. This...

DO REDUCTIONS IN CLINICAL SERVICE SAVE MONEY? It is common practice for management when faced with financial overspends to combat this by reducing services and closing wards or departments. But does this really save any money? It is a paradox of the present National Health Service that hard working units fall into an efficiency trap. The more work that is done, the more patients who are seen an...

BACKGROUND Academic medical centers strive for clinical excellence with operational efficiency and financial solvency, which requires institutions to retain productive and skillful surgical specialists. Faculty workplace perceptions, overall satisfaction, and intent to leave are relationships that have not been examined previously among US surgeons in academic medicine. We hypothesize that crit...

BACKGROUND Involvement in a compensation process following a motor vehicle collision is consistently associated with worse health status but the reasons underlying this are unclear. Some compensation systems are hypothesised to be more stressful than others. In particular, fault-based compensation systems are considered to be more adversarial than no-fault systems and associated with poorer rec...

BACKGROUND As the drive towards universal coverage is gaining momentum globally, the need for assessing levels of financial health protection in countries, particularity the developing world, has increasingly become important. In Swaziland, the level of financial health protection is not clearly understood. OBJECTIVE To assess financial catastrophe and impoverishment from out-of-pocket paymen...

In the editorial by Dr. A. Jay Block,' which appeared in the November 1993 issue of Chest, the author laments the disappearance of the ward laboratory and expresses some bewilderment over why this has occurred. In the inner-city hospital facing financial cuts in which I work, the motivation for its removal may have been financial, as tests performed in a ward laboratory are unreimbursed while t...

Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) of the World Health Organization have never been as committed as they are today to ensure that all people have access to needed health services without the risk of financial hardship – the message of universal health coverage (UHC) (1). The average share of out-of-pocket payments for EMR countries stands at around 40% and in some countries is ...

Based on survey data for Switzerland, new empirical findings on direct democracy are presented. In the first part, the authors show that, on average, public employees receive lower financial compensation under more direct democratic institutions. However, top bureaucrats are more constrained in direct democracies and have to be compensated by higher wages for that loss of power. In the second p...

*: Theory suggests that a united charity helps to economize on fundraising costs by reducing competition for donations among member charities. However, donors often cannot control the allocation of their donations, and charities may dislike the monitoring of their activities. This paper examines these and other issues relating to the Community Chest of Singapore. The results, based on analysis ...