China has undergone great economic and social change since 1978 with far reaching implications for the health care system and ultimately for the health status of the population. The Chinese Medical Reform of the 1980s made cost recovery a primary objective. The urban population is mostly protected by generous government health insurance. A high share government budget is allocated to urban heal...

This study estimates the propensity of firms to offer health insurance in a simultaneous equation model to control for the endogeneity between wages and health insurance. Previous research finds differences in rural and urban employer behavior with respect to health insurance benefits fully explained by differences in wages and firm size. In contrast, this study finds residual unexplained diffe...

China abandoned its free universal health care system and privatized it since 1980s. The direct consequence was that many people lost their access to health care, especially those without employers, including farmers in rural China, which in turn significantly reduced their medical care utilization. A new wave of rural cooperative medical insurance was first promoted in selected areas in 2003 a...

BACKGROUND China is reforming and restructuring its health insurance system to achieve the goal of universal coverage. This study aims to understand the determinants of public, private and multiple insurance coverage among people of retirement-age in China. METHODS We used data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Survey 2011 and 2013, a nationally representative survey of Chines...

BACKGROUND Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness in China, and poverty is a major barrier to having cataract surgery. In 2003, the Chinese government began a series of new national health insurance reforms, including the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) and the Urban Resident Basic Health Insurance scheme (URBMI). These two programs, combined with the previously existing Urban Emplo...

Title: The influences of Taiwan's National Health Insurance on women's choice of prenatal care facility: Investigation of differences between rural and non-rural areas Authors:

OBJECTIVE To evaluate alternative strategies for improving the uptake of benefits of a community based health insurance scheme by its poorest members. DESIGN Prospective cluster randomised controlled trial. SETTING Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) community based health insurance scheme in rural India. Participants 713 claimants at baseline (2003) and 1440 claimants two years later ...

Ever since the collapse of the once successful Rural Cooperative Medical System (RCMS) in the early 1980s, when China transformed its system of collective agricultural production to private production, many rural communities, especially the poorer residents, have faced several major problems. In 1993, insurance coverage for rural residents was already low, at 12.8%. By 1998, only 9.5% of the ru...