BACKGROUND Equitable utilization of health care is a primary goal of the Chinese health system. This study aimed to examine horizontal inequity in health care utilization and identify the factors resulting in inequity among the middle-aged and elderly in China. METHODS The data were obtained from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). We employed the concentration index ...

We use a Canadian survey of the unemployed to examine how household expenditures after a job loss respond to the level of income replacement provided by UI. We isolate a liquidity constraint or ‘transitory income’ effect from the ‘permanent income’ shock of job loss, and from the costs of working. We find significant effects of varying the replacement ratio among the third of the sample who did...

McPheeters et al1 provided a systematic review of the evidence thatwas used by theUSPreventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) to make its recent recommendations on universal autism screening.2 The USPSTF concluded that there is currently insufficientevidenceto assess the benefits of universal screening for autismspectrumdisorder (ASD) inyoung children. Inparticular, theUSPSTFnoted that no studyha...

The design of social insurance is modelled through majority voting. Individuals, risking the loss of income, vote sequentially on the type of benefits, flat v. proportional, as well as the level of social insurance benefits. The effects of allowing social insurance to be topped up in the private market are then examined. As expected, the existence of an actuarially fair insurance alternative de...

I introduce risk-averse preferences, labor-leisure choice, capital, individual productivity shocks, and market incompleteness to the standard Mortensen-Pissarides model of search and matching and explore the model’s cyclical properties. There are four main findings. First and foremost, the baseline model can generate the observed large volatility of unemployment and vacancies with a realistic r...

Political statements about the relationship between the economyand health intensify during economic downturns and fade in times of prosperity. Population health researchers share this cyclical interest in that the numbers of peerreviewed publications on this topic increase during and immediately after recessions. In this issue of the Journal, Cylus et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2014;180(1):45–52) fol...

this policy brief discusses preventive care benefits and cost-sharing included in health insurance provisions of the affordable care act (aca) legislation and highlights some consequences to americans and the country in terms of healthcare costs and value.

A unlt-hnked hfe insurance contract ~s a contract where the insurance benefits depend on the price of some specific traded stocks We consider a model describing the uncertainty of the financial market and a portfoho of insured individuals simultaneously. Due to incompleteness the insurance claims cannot be hedged completely by trading stocks and bonds only, leawng some risk to the insurer. The ...

BACKGROUND Tort law has legitimate social purposes of deterrence, punishment and compensation, but medical tort law does none of these well. Tort law could be counterproductive in medicine, encouraging costly defensive practices that harm some patients, restricting access to care in some settings and discouraging innovation. DISCUSSION Patients might be better served by purchasing combined he...

This paper argues that a risk averse of workers after-tax reservation wage the difference between her reservation wage and the tax needed to fund the unemployment insurance system when liquidity constraint binds exists and it is unique. The optimality of unemployment insurance based on the responsiveness of reservation wage to unemployment benefit shows the disincentive effect, i.e. higher unem...