From the early ‘70s the Italian families improved their welfare, raising the national dwelling standard level. During the same period, for several reasons, the rental market share on the total housing stock decreased from 40% to less that 20%. The situation was mainly caused, on the one hand, by some structural changes introduced in the leasing contracts, and, on the other hand, by some incenti...

BACKGROUND To assess progress in improving affordability of medicines since the introduction of mandatory health insurance in the Republic of Moldova. METHOD Using data from national health insurance, we estimate affordability of partially reimbursed medicines for the treatment of non-communicable diseases, and analyse which factors contributed to changes in affordability. RESULTS Affordabi...

AIMS To investigate how changes in alcohol price and affordability are related to aggregate level alcohol consumption in Australia to help to inform effective price and tax policy to influence consumption. MATERIAL AND METHODS Annual time series data between 1974 and 2012 on price and per-capita consumption for beer, wine and spirits and average weekly income were collected from the Australia...

OBJECTIVE To identify prevalences and predictors of nonfinancial barriers that lead to unmet need or delayed care among U.S. adults. DATA SOURCE 2007 Health Tracking Household Survey. STUDY DESIGN Reasons for unmet need or delayed care in the previous 12 months were assigned to one of five dimensions in the Penchansky and Thomas model of access to care. Prevalences of barriers in each nonfi...

Affordability is integral to the success of health care reforms aimed at ensuring universal access to health insurance coverage, and affordability determinations have major policy and practical consequences. This article describes factors that influenced the determination of affordability benchmarks and premium-contribution requirements for Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) expansions ...

Low-income households spend a substantial share of their income on utility services such as electricity, heating and water. The difficulty these socially vulnerable consumers have in affording further tariff increases is often used as an argument against tariff reform. However, detailed information on the utility expenditures of different consumer groups and the affordability implications of ta...

OBJECTIVE To quantitatively summarize results (i.e., prices and affordability) reported from international drug price comparison studies and assess their methodological quality. METHODS A systematic search of the most relevant databases-Medline, Embase, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA), and Scopus, from their inception to May 2009-was conducted to identify original research compar...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization recommends establishing and implementing a national pharmaceutical policy (NPP) to guarantee effective and equitable access to medicines. Mexico has implemented several policy approaches to regulate the pharmaceutical sector, but it has no formal NPP. This article describes the approach that the Mexican government has taken to improve availability and af...