Croatia continues to face a health-funding crisis. A recent supplemental health insurance law increases revenues through first increasing co-payments, then raising the payroll tax to cover those co-payments. This public finance "slight-of-hand" will not solve the system's structural issues and may worsen system performance both in terms of efficiency and equity. Should Croatia have considered p...

In recent months there has been growing discussion in the United States on the introduction of some form of national healt,h insurance under government sponsorship. Some of the proposals provide for the continued existence of private health insurance and even for considerable expansion within the context of a government-operated scheme. It is interesting to note in this connection that in both ...

Understanding health insurance is central to affording and accessing health care in the United States. Efforts to support consumers in making wise purchasing decisions and using health insurance to their advantage would benefit from the development of a valid and reliable measure to assess health insurance literacy. This article reports on the development of the Health Insurance Literacy Measur...

The purpose of this policy statement is to address the serious underinsurance (ie, insurance that exists but is inadequate) problems affecting insured adolescents' access to needed preventive, reproductive, and behavioral health care. In addition, the statement addresses provider payment problems that disproportionately affect clinicians who care for adolescents. Among adolescents with insuranc...

During the 1990s, the New Zealand health sector went through a decade of turbulence with a series of major structural changes being introduced in a relatively short period of time. The new millennium brought further change, with the establishment of 21 district health boards and the restoration of a less commercially-oriented system. The sector now appears to be more stable. However many increm...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to develop a policy characterisation process based on measuring shifts in use of private health insurance (PHI) immediately following implementation of changes in federal health care policy. METHOD Population-based hospital morbidity data from 1980 to 2001 were used to produce trend lines in the annual proportions of public, privately insured and privately ...

Health care spending represents a growing share of our national income, and based on current projections, will increase from 16% of the gross domestic product today to 20% by 2018. What does this mean for typical working families with private health insurance, who shoulder the financial burden of maintaining the current system? In this Issue Brief, Polsky and Grande construct a typical health c...

For the past 10 years the Ghana Government has been trying to replace the old user fee system with an overall health insurance scheme, but one problem of the old system continues to bedevil the new policy: exemption of the poor. This paper presents data from empirical fieldwork and also puts forward an opinion. It discusses how past experiences of user fee exemptions for the poor can inform exe...

BACKGROUND Social and national health insurance schemes are being introduced in many developing countries in moving towards universal health care. However, gaps in coverage are common and can only be met by out-of-pocket payments, general taxation, or private health insurance (PHI). This study provides an overview of PHI in different health care systems and discusses factors that affect its upt...

BACKGROUND Within the United States, public insurance premiums are used both to discourage private health policy holders from dropping coverage and to reduce state budget costs. Prior research suggests that the odds of having private coverage and being uninsured increase with increases in public insurance premiums. The aim of this paper is to test effects of Children's Health Insurance Program ...