INTRODUCTION Health care financing provides the resources and economic incentives for operating health systems and is a key determinant of health system performance. Equitable financing is based on: financial protection, progressive financing and cross-subsidies. This paper describes Uganda's health care financing landscape and documents the key equity issues associated with the current financi...

Persons with disabilities use more health care services due to ill health and face higher health care expenses and burden. This study explored the incidence of catastrophic health expenditures of households with persons with disabilities compared to that of those without such persons. We used the Korean Health Panel (KHP) dataset for the years 2010 and 2011. The final sample was 5,610 household...

This article describes a way to finance universal health care coverage that preserves much of the current financing system and replaces funds obtained from regressive sources with revenue from more progressive ones. New funding would be needed for 24 percent of health expenditures and would be raised through an increase in the federal personal income tax. Premiums are eliminated since their cos...

BACKGROUND The amount of out-of-pocket (OOP) payments within the German health care system has risen steadily within the last years. OOP payments aim to strengthen patients' cost awareness and try to restrict the demand on medical necessary treatments. However, besides the intended decline of non-induced health care services there's a risk that people also forgo necessary treatments because the...

OBJECTIVE Poverty is both a cause and consequence of tuberculosis. The objective of this study is to quantify patient/household costs for an episode of tuberculosis (TB), its relationships with household impoverishment, and the strategies used to cope with the costs by TB patients in a resource-limited high TB/HIV setting. METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted in three rural hospitals...

BACKGROUND Currently, there is a lack of knowledge regarding patient perceptions surrounding physician reimbursements, appropriate wait times, and out-of-pocket payment options for anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR). Our objective was to determine the current state of these perceptions in an Ontario setting. METHODS A survey was developed and pretested to address patient percept...

OBJECTIVE To estimate the incidence and describe the profile of catastrophic expenditures and impoverishment due to household out-of-pocket payments, comparing the periods before and after the introduction of universal health care coverage (UC). METHODS Secondary data analyses of socioeconomic surveys on nationally representative households pre-UC in 2000 (n = 24,747) and post-UC in 2002 (n =...

Many patients find that their out-of-pocket costs of medications are burdensome. Physicians can help, first by remembering to ask about the problem, and then by applying simple strategies to limit the patient's costs.