recognizing the advantages of primary care as a means of improving the entire health system, this text comments on reforms of publicly funded primary health centers, and the rapid development of private forprofit providers in sweden. many goals and expectations are connected to such reforms, which equally require critical analyses of scarce resources, professional trust/motivation and business ...

The assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit has been an implicit or explicit theoretical foundation of many empirical studies on remittances. This paper directly tests this assumption by comparing the response to health-related shocks among national and transnational households using panel data from Mexico for 2002 and 2005. While the occurrence of serious health shocks that req...

background: except in emergency cases, all patients should be seen first by a primary healthcare physician who decides whether a referral to secondary care is necessary. the present study examined the reasons for patient self-referral to specialists. methods: a random sample of 1036 individuals was selected from people attending public outpatient clinics and specialists’ offices in the private ...

IMPORTANCE Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) have revolutionized the approach to the prevention of sudden cardiac death and are commonly used in a wide range of high-risk patients, including the large population of patients with severe left ventricular systolic dysfunction. The benefit of these devices derives from their therapies, including both antitachycardia pacing and high-ene...

Understanding global food production trends is vital for ensuring food security and to allow the world to develop appropriate policies to manage the food system. Over the past few years, there has been an increasing attention on the global food system, particularly after the extreme shocks seen in food prices after 2007. Several papers and working groups have explored the links between food pro...

We investigate the labour supply response to acute health shocks experienced in the postcrash labour market by individuals of working age, using data from Understanding Society. Identification exploits uncertainty in the timing of an acute health shock, defined by the incidence of cancer, stroke, or heart attack. Results, obtained through a combination of coarsened exact and propensity score ma...

Life in rural areas of developing countries is prone to many kinds of risk, such as illness or mortality of household members, crop or other income loss due to natural phenomena (weather, insect infestations, or fire, for example), and civil conflict. In addition to their contemporaneous effects, the effects of certain types of shocks may still be felt many years or even decades later. From a p...

This article uses data on a sample of retirees drawn from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to examine changes in health over the retirement years and to estimate the effects of health changes in retirement on wealth. Using the framework of item response theory, we develop a novel measure of health that makes use of multiple indicators of physical health that are available in the HRS. We fi...

We investigate whether physicians' financial incentives influence health care supply, technology diffusion, and resulting patient outcomes. In 1997, Medicare consolidated the geographic regions across which it adjusts physician payments, generating area-specific price shocks. Areas with higher payment shocks experience significant increases in health care supply. On average, a 2 percent increas...