The WHO World Health Assembly, and the most recent WHO World Health Report, have called for all health systems to move toward universal coverage. However, low-income countries have made little progress in this respect. We use existing evidence to describe the evolution of community-based health insurance in low-income countries through the three stages of basic model, enhanced model, and nation...

289 Dutch population, on average, has changed plans each year. Moreover, accelerating consolidation of the health insurance market has restricted meaningful choice of insurance plan. Currently, four insurance conglomerates control about 90% of the Dutch health insurance market. Recent polls suggest public dissatisfaction with private insurers, with 65% of insured people reporting that they have...

Despite having achieved an average life expectancy of 75 years, much the same as that of more developed countries, Mexico entered the 21st century with a health system mared by its failure to offer financial protection in health to more than half of its citizens; this was both a result and a cause of the social inequalities that have marked the development process in Mexico. Several structural ...

There are two dominant approaches to describe and understand the anatomy of complete health and well-being systems internationally. Yet, neither approach has been able to either predict or explain occasional but dramatic crises in health and well-being systems around the world and in developed emerging market or developing country contexts. As the impacts of such events can be measured not simp...

This is the latest in a series of reports of the same title that have been published intermittently since the early 1960’s. The term social security is popularly used in the United States to refer to the basic national social insurance program-old-age, survivors, disability, and health insurance. The term is used here in a broader sense to describe all types of social insurance, social assistan...

In the voluminous academic literature and public policy discourse on how health insurance affects medical spending, the famous RAND Health Insurance Experiment stands apart. Between 1974 and 1981, the RAND experiment provided health insurance to more than 5,800 individuals from about 2,000 households in six different locations across the United States, a sample designed to be representative of ...

Life-saving technology used to treat catastrophic illnesses such as heart disease and cancer is often out of reach for the poor. As life expectancy increases in poor countries and the burden from chronic illnesses continues to rise, so will the unmet need for expensive tertiary care. Understanding how best to increase access to and reduce the financial burden of expensive tertiary care is a cru...