We analyse nine low-income and lower-middle-income countries in Africa and Asia that have implemented national health insurance reforms designed to move towards universal health coverage. Using the functions-of-health-systems framework, we describe these countries' approaches to raising prepaid revenues, pooling risk, and purchasing services. Then, using the coverage-box framework, we assess th...

The experience of homelessness not only affects physical health, but can also constrain access to required health care. In a number of European countries, national strategies to tackle homelessness have sought to deliver integrated solutions across housing, health and other social policy areas. This article examines approaches to meeting the health care needs of homeless people in relation to s...

The goal of Universal health coverage (UHC) is to ensure that all people obtain the health services they need without suffering financial hardship when paying for them [1]. This goal is based on the idea of an affordable continuum of care from preventive to curative and rehabilitative services for which essential health system resources are required. These resources include health workers, esse...

We propose a new approach to the study of comparative public policy that examines how the agenda-setting attributes of an issue combine with problems to drive political attention. Whereas existing comparative policy studies tend to focus on how institutional or programmatic differences affect policy and politics, we begin by asking how the issue itself affects politics across nations. We illust...

Background and Objectives: Induced demand in healthcare is referred to as provision of unnecessary services or the patient by health services providers, while the patient is not aware of their unnecessity. Apart from being unethical, this practice can potentially disturb the supply and demand balance in the health market, pose financial load on the patient, thread the patient’s health by imposi...

In recent months, $US1.1 billion in federal stimulus funding has helped to propel a movement to achieve higher-quality, lower-cost healthcare in the US through the conduct and dissemination of comparative effectiveness research (CER). If efficacy is an abstract and intrinsic attribute of a drug – a measurement of how well it works in the clinical petri-dish of the placebo-controlled trial – the...

Background In 2004, the health system in Iran initiated an organizational reform aiming to increase the autonomy of teaching hospitals and make them more decentralized. The policy led to the formation of a board of trustees in each hospital and significant modifications in hospitals’ financing. Since the reform aimed to improve its predecessor policy (implementation of hospital autonomy began i...

CONTEXT A small proportion of patients with serious illness or multiple chronic conditions account for the majority of health care spending. Despite the high cost, evidence demonstrates that these patients receive health care of inadequate quality, characterized by fragmentation, overuse, medical errors, and poor quality of life. METHODS This article examines data demonstrating the impact of ...