This report provides nationwide and state-specific estimates of U.S. health care administration spending and potential savings in 2003 were the United States to institute a Canadian-style national health insurance system. The United States wastes more on health care bureaucracy than it would cost to provide health care to all its uninsured. Administrative expenses will consume at least dollar 3...

In 2006, Massachusetts passed legislation that broadened access to health insurance for its residents. The percentage of the state population that had health insurance (obtained through either private insurance or publicly funded programs) subsequently increased, reaching 97% in 2011, leaving only 3% uninsured, compared with approximately 9%-20% uninsured among nonelderly residents in 2006. Giv...

OBJECTIVE To assess changes in preventive screening utilization in older Mexicans, pre- and post-Seguro Popular. MATERIALS AND METHODS Data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS/Enasem) 2001 and 2012 were used. Logistic and ordinary least squares regression adjusted models were used to predict preventive care in 2012 by insurance status categories in 2001-2012, as the focus explanator...

County data on the percentage of people without health insurance are seldom available, although state program planning requires such information. As part of an evaluation of Washington's Basic Health Plan (BHP), we conducted a telephone survey in nine Washington counties to estimate the percentage of people under the age of 65 who were uninsured. We used regression analysis to estimate the perc...

Numerous data sets are available which allow us to count and describe the socio-economic characteristics of the uninsured in the US. While these data differ on precise estimates, by all accounts the number of uninsured is large (around 40 million in the best of economic times) and prone to grow, both in absolute terms along with the population and as a percentage of the population when the econ...

The magnitude of provider uncompensated care has become an important public policy issue. Yet existing measures of uncompensated care are flawed because they compare uninsured payments to list prices, not to the prices actually paid by the insured. We address this issue using a novel source of data from a vendor that processes financial data for almost 4000 physicians. We measure uncompensated ...

BACKGROUND Research from other medical specialties suggests that uninsured patients experience treatment delays, receive fewer diagnostic tests, and have reduced health literacy when compared with their insured counterparts. We hypothesized that these disparities in interventions would not be present among patients experiencing trauma. Our objective was to examine differences in diagnostic and ...

CONTEXT Uninsured adults receive less appropriate care and have more adverse health consequences than insured adults. Longitudinal studies would help to more clearly define the effects of health insurance on health care and health. OBJECTIVE To assess the differential effects of gaining Medicare coverage on use of basic clinical services and medications by previously insured and uninsured adu...

BACKGROUND This research evaluates the effect of hospital competition on inward and outward patient transfers for different types of payers including the uninsured. Although it is a less spotlighted issue, an equally important topic is the likelihood of inter-hospital patient transfers of the insured and the uninsured. This study attempts to fill a gap in the research about the relationship bet...

BACKGROUND The introduction of health insurance in Ghana in 2003 has resulted in a tremendous increase in utilization of health services. However, concerns are being raised about the quality of patient care. Some of the concerns include long waiting times, verbal abuse of patients by health care providers, inadequate physical examination by doctors and discrimination of insured patients. The st...