Access to Care: Remembering Old Lessons

AIDS and access to care: lessons for health care reformers.

Financing Long-Term Care: Lessons From Japan

Long-term care (LTC) must be carefully delineated when expenditures are compared across countries because how LTC services are defined and delivered differ in each country. LTC’s objectives are to compensate for functional decline and mitigate the care burden of the family. Governments have tended to focus on the poor but Germany opted to make LTC universally available ...

Old lessons relearnt.

In medicine as in history we often have to learn things the hard way. Sometimes we don’t recognise the value of something until it is gone. The 2012 Health and Social Care Act, for example, eliminated strategic health authorities in England. Our editorialists Nick Black and Nicholas Mays point out that only a few years later regional authority is being reintroduced, in the form of sustainabilit...

Unregulated access to health-care services is associated with overutilization—lessons from Austria

The Austrian health-care system is characterized by free provider choice and uncontrolled access to all levels of care. Using primary data, the ECOHCARE study shows that hospitalization rates for the secondary and tertiary care levels in Austria are both 4.4 times higher than those reported from the USA using a similar methodology. At the same time, essential functions of the primary care secto...

Barriers of access to care in a managed competition model: lessons from Colombia

BACKGROUND The health sector reform in Colombia, initiated by Law 100 (1993) that introduced a managed competition model, is generally presented as a successful experience of improving access to care through a health insurance regulated market. The study's objective is to improve our understanding of the factors influencing access to the continuum of care in the Colombian managed competition mo...