In Ghana, Tanzania and South Africa, health care financing is progressive overall. However, out-of-pocket payments and health insurance for the informal sector are regressive. The distribution of health care benefits is generally pro-rich. This paper explores the factors influencing these distributions in the three countries. Qualitative data were collected through focus group discussions and i...

BACKGROUND Greece is hit hard by the state debt crisis. This calls for comprehensive reforms to restore sustainable and balanced growth. Healthcare is one of the public sectors needing reform. The European Union (EU) Task Force for Greece asked the authors to assess the situation of primary care and to make recommendations for reform. Primary healthcare is especially relevant in that it might i...

The paper describes the state and trends of health care, as well as the comprehensive reform program in Armenia. It presents previous, current situation and focuses on future development options. After demonstrating the logic of the investigation, the paper recapitulates the information about results of reform that do not appear to meet all the objectives of health care policy. The reform proce...

Background: Time series analyses on the relationship between nurse staffing and inpatient care quality are rare due to inconsistent frequencies of data common observations nurse-staffing (e.g., monthly) indicators quarterly). Methods: In order deal with issue mixed frequency data, this research adopted MF-VAR model explore causal relationships among staffing, quality, hospital competition under...

BACKGROUND After many years of sanctions and conflict, Iraq is rebuilding its health system, with a strong emphasis on the traditional hospital-based services. A network exists of public sector hospitals and clinics, as well as private clinics and a few private hospitals. Little data are available about the approximately 1400 Primary Health Care clinics (PHCCs) staffed with doctors. How do Iraq...

Models of the determinants of individuals' primary care costs can be used to set capitation payments to providers and to test for horizontal equity. We compare the ability of eight measures of patient morbidity and multimorbidity to predict future primary care costs and examine capitation payments based on them. The measures were derived from four morbidity descriptive systems: 17 chronic disea...

INTRODUCTION Section 6002 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as the Sunshine Act, requires that manufacturers report payments or other transfers of value made to physicians and teaching hospitals [1,2]. The tracking of such payments goes into effect on August 1, 2013, and the new rules could affect radiologists. In this column, I pose and answer several questions rega...

Side-payments are common in many long-term relationships. We show that when players can exchange side-payments, approximate efficiency is achievable in any repeated game with private monitoring and communication, so long as the players can observe their own payoffs and are sufficiently patient, the efficient stage-game outcome is unique, and the signal distribution has full support. Unlike exis...

THE JUNE 2012 ISSUE OF CONSUMER REPORTS includes a cover story entitled “5 Medical Tests You Don’t Need.” The story reflects a joint Choosing Wisely initiative by Consumer Reports and the American Board of Internal Medicine aimed at “encouraging physicians, patients and other health care stakeholders to think and talk about medical tests and procedures that may be unnecessary, and in some insta...