User fees exemptions alone are not enough to increase indigent use of healthcare services

User fee exemptions are not enough: out-of-pocket payments for 'free' delivery services in rural Tanzania.

OBJECTIVE To identify the main drivers of costs of facility delivery and the financial consequences for households among rural women in Tanzania, a country with a policy of delivery fee exemptions. METHODS We selected a representative sample of households in a rural district in western Tanzania. Women who given birth within 5 years were asked about payments for doctor's/nurse's fees, drugs, n...

Query Logs Alone are not Enough

The practice of guiding a search engine based on query logs observed from the engine's user population provides large volumes of data but potentially also sacrifices the privacy of the user. In this paper, we ask the following question: Is it possible, given rich instrumented data from a panel and usability study data, to observe complete information without routinely analyzing query logs? What...

Myth: user fees ensure better use of health services.

Tough economic times stir up anxiety over the affordability of public services—especially healthcare. As governments struggle to balance budgets, and healthcare spending continues to grow faster than the economy, conditions are ripe for old—and often discredited—policy ideas to make a comeback. User fees are no exception. At first blush, user fees appear to be an obvious solution. After all, an...

Dominance alone is not enough.

Muscle alone is not enough.

Irritability, the property of response to the forces in the environment , is present in even the more primitive living cells. If a weak electric shock or touch is applied to an amoeba, it will immediately respond with a movement exemplified by a flow of its protoplasm. It will also respond to temperature, oxygen, pH, and various other environmental stimuli. Yet this primitive single-cell organi...