Children in higher income families are less likely than poor children to be without a regular source of health care. However, insurance coverage makes a real difference for poor children in terms of access to health care. Among all poor children under six years of age, 21 percent of those without health insurance had no usual source of care, compared with 4 percent of poor children covered by i...

OBJECTIVE To assess physicians views on health insurance and its implication on the health care system. METHODS We carried out a cross-sectional study in 2 major hospitals in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Data were collected from January to December 2002 through self-administered questionnaires that were distributed to a total sample of 400 physicians. The instrument consisted of 28 items ...

BACKGROUND The maternal mortality ratio in the Philippines remains high; thus, it will be difficult to achieve the Millennium Development Goals 5 by 2015. Approximately two-thirds of all maternal deaths occur during the postpartum period. Therefore, we conducted the present study to examine the current state of postpartum health care service utilization in the Philippines, and identify challeng...

OBJECTIVES To (1) compare home health and informal (unpaid) services utilization among patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), (2) examine longitudinal changes in services use, and (3) estimate possible interdependence of home health and informal care utilization. METHODS The sample is drawn from the Predictors Study, a large, multicenter cohort of patients with probable AD, prospectively fol...

Against the backdrop of population aging, this paper presents the analysis of need-standardised health care utilization among elderly in India. Based on nationally representative morbidity and health care survey 2004, we demonstrate that the need for health care utilization is indeed pro-poor in nature. However, the actual health care utilization is concentrated among richer sections of the pop...

background: households’ financial protection against health payments and expenditures and equity in utilization of health care services are of the most important tasks of governments. this study aims to measuring equity in household’s health care payments according to fairness in financial contribution (ffc) and kakwani indices in tehran-iran, 2013. methods: this cross-sectional study was condu...

background out of eight commonly agreed millennium development goals (mdg), six are related to the attainment of universal health coverage (uhc) throughout the globe. this universalization of health status suggests policies to narrow the gap in access and benefit sharing between different socially and economically underprivileged classes with that of the better placed ones and a consequent expa...

BACKGROUND Utilization of specialty care may not be a discrete, isolated behavior but rather, a behavior of sequential movements within the health care system. Although patients may often visit their primary care physician and receive a referral before utilizing specialty care, prior studies have underestimated the importance of accounting for these sequential movements. METHODS The sample in...