Background and Aim: The health system financing is the process of collecting, pooling and managing financial resources and purchasing healthcare services. Health financing plays an important role in achieving the health system goals and objectives specially universal health coverage. The aim of this study was to strategically analyze the Iranian health financing system and recommend strategies ...

–The Kenya government has over the years reiterated its commitment towards the provision of quality primary health care (PHC) to her populace. The various macroeconomic performance experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, however affected the government’s ability to sustain the continued provision of PHC. This is not only demonstrated by the high out-of-pocket spending but also low budget...

BACKGROUND Financial risk protection and equity are major components of universal health coverage (UHC), which is defined as ensuring access to health services for all citizens without any undue financial burden. We investigated progress towards UHC financial risk indicators and assessed variability of inequalities in financial risk protection indicators by wealth quintile. We further examined ...

South Africa is considering introducing a universal health care system. A key concern for policy-makers and the general public is whether or not this reform is affordable. Modelling the resource and revenue generation requirements of alternative reform options is critical to inform decision-making. This paper considers three reform scenarios: universal coverage funded by increased allocations t...

OBJECTIVE Target 10 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to "halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation". Because of its impacts on a range of diseases, it is a health-related MDG target. This study presents cost estimates of attaining MDG target 10. METHODS We estimate the population to be covered to attain the MDG t...

BACKGROUND Inadequate access to mental health (MH) services in Lebanon, where prevalence is noteworthy, is a concern. Although a multitude of factors affects access to services, lack of financial coverage of MH services is one that merits further investigation. AIM OF THE STUDY This study aims at providing a systematic description of MH financing systems with a special focus on Lebanon, prese...

We correct the double spend race analysis given in Nakamoto’s foundational Bitcoin article and give a closed-form formula for the probability of success of a double spend attack using the Regularized Incomplete Beta Function. We give the first proof of the exponential decay on the number of confirmations and find an asymptotic formula. Larger number of confirmations are necessary compared to th...

We study the problem of preventing double spending in electronic payment schemes in a distributed fashion. This problem occurs, for instance, when the spending of electronic coins needs to be controlled by a large collection of nodes (e.g., in a peer-to-peer (P2P) system) instead of one central bank. Contrary to the commonly held belief that this is fundamentally impossible, we propose several ...

Micropayment systems are electronic payment systems that are used for very small payment and for their viability must have small transaction cost. In this paper we propose a coin-based micropayment scheme that uses a probabilistic fraud checking with distributed verification to provide an efficient solution to detect double spending by malicious customers and hence reduces the risk on the merch...