This paper examines the performance of Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI), a universal health insurance program, implemented in 1995, that covers comprehensive services. The authors address two key questions: Did the NHI cause Taiwanese health spending to escalate to an "unaffordable" level? What are the benefits of the NHI? They find that Taiwan's single-payer NHI system enabled Taiwan t...

BACKGROUND Implementation of National Health Insurance (NHI) commenced recently. With the promise of addressing drastic inequalities in the health sector, NHI has the potential to positively transform the health system . In particular, NHI could have a significant positive impact on females, who are disadvantaged under the current system, with higher rates of poor health and lower rates of medi...

The extent and existence of defensive medicine in the face of medical malpractice liability pressure is a perennial subject of both policy and academic debate. In this paper, I investigate the impact of a series of court rulings in Taiwan that increased physicians’ liability risks, and a subsequent amendment to the law that reversed the courts’ rulings, on physicians’ test-ordering behavior and...

Purpose Asthma is a chronic disease increasingly found in children. In order to find more economical and efficient alternatives to treat pediatric asthma, the Bureau of National Health Insurance of Taiwan launched the Traditional Chinese Medicine Holistic Treatment Program (TCMHTP). Based on the data collected during the program, we evaluated the effect of TCM holistic treatments on pediatric a...

BACKGROUND The national long-term care insurance was implemented in July 2008. Few studies have been conducted with representative national survey data since the long-term care insurance was introduced. Therefore, this study examines the extent to which equity in the use of long-term care has been achieved in Korea. METHODS The Aday-Andersen model was used as a conceptual model, based on the ...

BACKGROUND National/social health insurance schemes have increasingly been seen in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as a vehicle to universal health coverage (UHC) and a viable alternative funding mechanism for the health sector. Several countries, including Ghana, have thus introduced and implemented mandatory national health insurance schemes (NHIS) as part of reform efforts towa...