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...

South Korea is one of the world's most rapidly industrializing countries. Along with industrialization has come universal health insurance. Within the span of 12 years, South Korea went from private voluntary health insurance to government-mandated universal coverage. Since 1997, with the intervention of the International Monetary Fund, Korean national health insurance (NHI) has experienced def...

INTRODUCTION Uganda is currently designing a National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme, with the aim of raising additional resources for the health sector. Very little was known about the health insurance market in Uganda before this study, so one of our main objectives was to investigate the nature of the private health insurance market in Uganda and the opinions of various stakeholders on NHI, w...

In 1995, Taiwan implemented a national health insurance program (NHI) to provide equitable, affordable, and universal health care coverage to all its citizens. Prior to this, 43% of the population was uninsured and 57% was covered by one of three major insurance programs. In this study, we examine the effect of NHI on the utilization of medical services (physician visits and medication use) for...

Data resource basics: The National Health Information Database (NHID) is a public database on health care utilization, health screening, socio-demographic variables, and mortality for the whole population of South Korea, formed by the National Health Insurance Service. The population included in the data is over 50 million, and the participation rate in the health screening programs was 74.8% i...

This study was carried out to determine the level of support towards the proposed National Health Insurance scheme among Malaysian patients attending specialist clinics at the National University of Malaysia Medical centre and its influencing factors. The cross sectional study was carried out from July-October 2012. 260 patients were selected using multistage sampling method. 71.2% of responden...

BACKGROUND Moral hazard or utilization hazard refers to the phenomenon during which patients overuse medical services under national health insurance (NHI) because the services are free or the patients are required to pay only a portion of the utilization costs. The aim of this study is to investigate how NHI and private health insurance (PHI) systems influence increases in health care utilizat...

OBJECTIVE To analyze evolution of the health technology assessment (HTA) at the national level in South Korea. METHODS Analysis of public documents, personal communication, and literative review. RESULTS HTA in South Korea has been developed since 1990s, first introduced by academia and institutionalized within the National Health Insurance (NHI). Rapidly increasing expenditure had been a c...

BACKGROUND To determine whether the availability of National Health Insurance (NHI) is associated with a longitudinal increase in life satisfaction among older Taiwanese adults. METHODS This study used data from the Taiwan Longitudinal Study on Aging, a nationally representative sample (n = 3778) of older adults aged 60 and above. Participants were interviewed prior to the establishment of NH...

Korean National Health Insurance (NHI) was introduced in 1963 and became a nationwide health insurance after several law reforms in 1988. As a result of nationalization, coverage has expanded, and its service level has greatly improved since 1998 [1]. However, several diagnostic and therapeutic modalities for rare, incurable diseases such as malignant hematologic diseases are excluded from the ...