BACKGROUND The Taiwan government adopted National Health Insurance (NHI) in 1995, providing universal health care to all citizens. It was financed by mandatory premium contributions made by employers, employees, and the government. Since then, the government has faced increasing challenges to control NHI expenditures. The aim of this study was to determine trends in the provision of dental serv...

According to the Constitution of South Africa (SA), citizens living in remote areas are entitled to the same level of healthcare as those with access to tertiary hospitals. Specialist outreach has been shown to achieve this. When SA's National Health Services Commission convened (1942 - 1944), Gluckman summarised: 'Where the need is greatest the supply of hospitals is least.' Primary healthcare...

Five years after the release of its Green Paper on National Health Insurance (NHI),years after the institution of NHI pilot sites and following the recent release of the White Pa 4 per on NHI, South Africa (SA) needs to move beyond the phase 1 plans of policy making and healthening activities to phase 2 - putting into place the legal and institutional frameth system strengworks and systems for ...

BACKGROUND Medical spending on psychiatric hospitalization has been reported to impose a tremendous socio-economic burden on many developed countries with public health insurance programmes. However, there has been no in-depth study of the factors affecting psychiatric inpatient medical expenditures and differentiated these factors across different types of public health insurance programmes. I...

Practitioners Foundation (SAPPF), are pitching in to help government clean up the primary health care delivery mess. Both agree with national health minister, Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, that a complete 're-engineering' of the dysfunctional public health care sector is needed for any variation of National Health Insurance (NHI) to succeed. However, Motsoaledi and his cabinet colleagues also believe th...

The aim of this study was to assess whether acetaminophen poisoning is associated with a higher risk of acute pancreatitis. We conducted a retrospective cohort study by using the longitudinal population-based database of Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI) program between 2000 and 2011. The acetaminophen cohort comprised patients aged 20 years with newly identified acetaminophen poisoning ...

OBJECTIVES To identify the effects of supplemental private health insurance on health care utilization and expenditure under the mandatory National Health Insurance(NHI) system in Korea. METHODS The data were collected by the National Cancer Center in Korea. Cancer patients who were newly diagnosed with stomach (ICD code, C16), lung(C33-C34), liver (C22), colorectal cancer(C18-C20) or breast(...

STUDY DESIGN A cross-national study. OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence and incidence of osteoporosis (OP) and osteoporotic vertebral fracture (OVF) in Korea and to investigate if socioeconomic status has an effect. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA As life expectancy increases, OP and related fragility fractures are also increasing. This presents a serious challenge, not only for health author...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have evaluated the effects of various health manpower policies but did not include full consideration of the effect of universal health insurance on physician re-distribution. This study examines the effects of implementing National Health Insurance (NHI) on the problem of geographic mal-distribution of health providers in Taiwan. METHODS Data on health providers a...

PURPOSE Korea started breast cancer screening as part of the National Cancer Screening Program (NCSP) in 1999. In order to identify under-served groups, we investigated mammography uptake in the National Breast Cancer Screening Program. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study population was participants in the National Breast Cancer Screening Program from 2004 to 2008. We analyzed participation rates...