OBJECTIVE To investigate changes in the expenditure of giving birth in health-care facilities in rural China during 1998-2007, to examine the financial burden on households, particularly poor ones, and to identify factors associated with out-of-pocket expenditure. METHODS Cross-sectional data on births between 1998 and 2007 were obtained from national household surveys conducted in 2003 and 2...

Health care expenditure in the United States exceeds $2 trillion a year, and on a per capita basis far exceeds the expenditure of any other country. Much of this money is not well spent, as many studies have documented the inefficiency and waste in the public and private health care systems. Furthermore, despite the high cost of American health care, key measures of the nation’s health, such as...

Primary care research has been described as a "lost cause", and, although this claim has been strongly refuted, general practitioners publish less research than their colleagues in surgery, medicine and public health. Despite a fivefold increase in Australian general practice research papers from the 1980s to the 1990s, fewer than half of these focused on clinical topics. Trying to establish a ...

We explore the determinants of usage of six different types of health care services, using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data, years 1996-2000. We apply a number of models for univariate count data, including semiparametric, semi-nonparametric and finite mixture models. We find that the complexity of the model that is required to fit the data well depends upon the way in which the data i...

We investigate how the employment-based health insurance system in the U.S. affects individuals' life-cycle health-care decisions. We take the viewpoint that health is a form of human capital that affects workers' productivities on the job, and derive implications of employees' turnover on the incentives to undertake health investment. Our model suggests that employee turnovers lead to dynamic ...

Introduction Estimates of health care expenses for the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized (community) population are critical to policymakers and others concerned with access to medical care and the cost and sources of payment for that care. In 2009, health care expenses among the U.S. community population totaled $1.26 trillion. Medical care expenses, however, are highly concentrated among a r...

BACKGROUND Refraining from required medical care can worsen health, particularly for the elderly, and increase public medical expenditure, which destabilizes the financial aspect of social security. Social capital, such as trust between residents and the norms of reciprocity in the community, is a possible measure to prevent refraining from medical care. METHODS We studied survey data collect...

BACKGROUND Unequal geographical distribution of medical care resources and insufficient healthcare coverage have been two long-standing problems with Taiwan's public health system. The implementation of National Health Insurance (NHI) attempted to mitigate the inequality in health care use. This study examines the degree to which Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) has reduced out-of-pocke...

There is little documentation of the potential catastrophic effects of injuries on families due to out of pocket (OOP) expenditure for medical care. Patients who were admitted for at least one night in a tertiary care hospital of Chandigarh city due to injury were recruited and were followed-up at 1, 2 and 12 months after discharge to collect information on OOP expenditure. Out of the total 227...