BACKGROUND Essential medicines (EMs) are those medicines which satisfy the priority health care needs of the population. Although it is a fundamental human right, access to essential medicines has been a big challenge in developing countries particularly for children. WHO recommends assessing the current situations on availability and affordability of EMs as the first step towards enhancing acc...

This paper examines the economic rationale of affordability exemptions in the context of a health insurance mandate. I provide an economic definition of affordability and discuss how it is implemented in the contexts of food, housing, and health care. Affordability standards are frequently used in making food and housing policy, but both empirically and theoretically health care operates quite ...

Affordability is a key consideration in debates about the mandate for Americans to buy health insurance as required by the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Yet no universally agreedupon standard exists for determining what constitutes affordable health insurance. The question, then, is how best to make decisions about what is affordable. The articles in this issue by Peter Muenn...

We draw a distinction between the concepts of purchase affordability (whether a household is able to borrow enough funds to purchase a house) and repayment affordability (the burden imposed on a household of repaying the mortgage). We operationalize this distinction in the context of a new methodology for constructing affordability measures that draws on the value-at-risk concept and takes acco...

Results: The time series analysis suggests a close link between vodka affordability and liver cirrhosis mortality rates in Russia: a 1% increase in affordability of vodka implies a 0.5% increase in male mortality rate and a 1.68% increase in female mortality rate. Conclusions: The major conclusion emerging from this study is that affordability of alcohol is one of the most important predictor o...

OBJECTIVE To investigate how affordable cigarettes are in developed and developing countries, and to calculate by how much the affordability of cigarettes has changed between 1990 and 2001; and secondly, to investigate the relation between cigarette affordability and consumption. DESIGN Affordability was defined as the cost of cigarettes relative to per capita income. Trends in cigarette affo...

BACKGROUND Despite strong empirical support for the association between perceived food affordability and dietary intake amongst families with a lower socioeconomic position (SEP), there is limited evidence of the most effective strategies for promoting more positive perceptions of healthy food affordability among this group. This paper reports findings from a pilot intervention that aimed to im...

Many consumers report that healthy eating is more expensive than unhealthy eating (the affordability axiom). We hypothesize that endorsement of this belief may be driven by the motivation to eat unhealthy foods. We tested this hypothesis in three studies. Study 1 revealed that the affordability axiom is associated with poorer eating habits and higher Body Mass Index (BMI). Study 2 found that th...

INTRODUCTION Cigarette excise tax and price increases reduce smoking consumption and prevalence. Studies have previously defined cigarette affordability internationally and have discussed its relevance as a tobacco control policy measure. This study provides the first estimates on cigarette affordability in the United States. METHODS Cigarette affordability was defined as cigarette price in r...