We develop an empirical method to assess the degree of financial exposure associated with medical care spending among non-elderly U.S. households with employer-sponsored insurance. A key feature of this method is its simplicity – it only requires data on out-of-pocket (OOP) health care spending and total health care spending and does not require detailed knowledge of health insurance benefit de...

Background & Objective:  Islamic fasting is observed by millions of Muslims across the world during the holy month of Ramadan and other specific  days of the lunar year. Fasting  Muslims  abstain from eating and drinking from dawn until sunset. Depending on season and geographical location, Muslims  maintain fasting for approximately 13-18 hours per day. The present study aimed to review the be...

Health policy in the United States is at a new juncture in its development. Policy choices can be made based on three decades of experience during which diverse policy goals were established in succession. Health policy is also at a point where occupational therapists can make substantial contributions. In recent legislation and other health policy, the patient's functional status and quality o...

Expansion of health care coverage has risen to the top of the legislative agenda in California. One question within the health care reform debate is whether expanding health insurance to all Californians will attract new undocumented immigrants who would come primarily for those benefits. A review of studies on immigration and public benefits suggests that the net attraction of any major expans...

This purpose of this paper is to provide a summary of the cost-effectiveness research for the profession and practice of marriage and family therapy. Studies based on four sources of data were considered: (1) a western United States HMO covering 180,000 subscribers; (2) the Kansas State Medicaid system with over 300,000 beneficiaries; (3) Cigna, a large Unites States health insurance benefits m...

INTRODUCTION In countries with high burden of HIV, major programmatic challenges have been identified to preventing new infections among children and scaling up of treatment for pregnant mothers. We initiated this study to examine operational approaches that were used to enhance implementation of PMTCT interventions in Muhima health Centre (Kigali/Rwanda) from 2007 to 2010. METHODS The prospe...

Previous reviews have shown that changes in prescription drug insurance benefits can affect medication use and adherence. We conducted a systematic review of the literature to identify studies addressing the association between prescription drug coverage and health outcomes. Studies were included if they collected empirical data on expansions or restrictions of prescription drug coverage and if...

This paper relates physical and mental health status to labor force participation and compares these relationships among self-report and proxy respondents. Previous research has conjectured that self-reports of health status may lead to an upward bias in the estimated effect of health on labor productivity because subjects who are out of the labor force may be more likely to understate their he...