an elusive goal, but one that continues to be pursued. Discussions tend to focus on the health implications of lack of coverage, yet the economic consequences are equally significant. For some, lack of health insurance can be an inconvenience; for others, it can mean financial devastation. In an HCFO-funded study, David Dranove, Ph.D., Northwestern University, and colleagues compared the financ...

BACKGROUND In light of the fact that chronic diseases were becoming more prevalent recently, the primary objective of the study was to examine the socio-demographic, health, and lifestyle determinants of the use of preventive medical care in Penang, Malaysia. METHODS The study used the primary survey data in Penang which had a total of 398 respondents. Respondents were chosen based on conveni...

The aim of the study was to determine the prevalence of alexithymia in an elderly Finnish population sample. Associations between alexithymia and sociodemographic factors were investigated, together with the relationship between alexithymia and perceived somatic health and self-reported psychic health. The study forms a part of the Turun Vanhustutkimus (TUR-VA) project, which is a longitudinal,...

This study compares the effects of two distinct forms of human capital - income and education - on marital status and childlessness separately by sex in six different countries. Nearly 10 million individual records on individuals aged 16 to 50 were used from censuses from Brazil, Mexico, Panama, South Africa, USA and Venezuela dating from 2000 or later, to analyse the relationship between educa...

Our first goal is to link empirical measures of three theoretical explanations of marital status differences to the variation in male and female standardized suicide difference coefficients SSDCs in 12 developed countries, circa 1960. We include predictors of Durkheim's social integration hypothesis, Gibbs and Martin's concept of marital status integration, and norms on suicide acceptability. A...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of parental marital status, marital history, and family type on intergenerational living arrangements and adult children's time and cash transfers to their unpartnered disabled elderly parents. METHODS We used data from the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old survey to estimate the joint probabilities that an adult...

A large amount of evidence shows that the subjective evaluation of health is a predictor of survival in many different populations. Subjective health (SH) is measured using different types of measures such as a general evaluation of health or a comparative evaluation of health. The aim of this study was to compare the prediction of survival by two measures of SH (a general measure and an age-re...

The pursuit of happiness is viewed as an inalienable right by most Americans, but the government of the United States does not ensure that the right is equally enjoyed by all its citizens. There is significant difference in the distribution of happiness among different aggregates of American people. Using General Social Survey (GSS) 1998 data, this paper analyzes which aggregates of American pe...