The delivery of mental health services might offer the most paradigmatic window into the fragmentation of health services in the United States. Not only is delivery fragmented across outpatient clinicians, inpatient services, prescription drugs, and other behavioral interventions, but the rise of mental health carveouts has meant that insurance benefits have been fragmented across mental and ph...

BACKGROUND More than half of veterans who use Veterans Health Administration (VA) care are also eligible for Medicare via disability or age, but no prior studies have examined variation in use of outpatient services by Medicare-eligible veterans across health system, type of care or time. OBJECTIVES To examine differences in use of VA and Medicare outpatient services by disability-eligible or...

background and objectives: induced demand in healthcare is referred to as provision of unnecessary services or the patient by health services providers, while the patient is not aware of their unnecessity. apart from being unethical, this practice can potentially disturb the supply and demand balance in the health market, pose financial load on the patient, thread the patient’s health by imposi...

BACKGROUND Older veterans may use both the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and Medicare, but the association of dual use with health outcomes is unclear. We examined the association of indirect measures of dual use with mortality. METHODS Our secondary analysis used survey, claims, and National Death Index data from the Survey on Assets and Health Dynamics among the Oldest Old. The analy...

BACKGROUND Poverty due to illness has become a substantial social problem in rural China since the collapse of the rural Cooperative Medical System in the early 1980s. Although the Chinese government introduced the New Rural Cooperative Medical Schemes (NRCMS) in 2003, the associations between different health insurance benefit package designs and healthcare utilization remain largely unknown. ...

BACKGROUND A nationwide asthma survey on the effects of air pollution is lacking in Taiwan. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the time trend and the relationship between air pollution and health care services for asthma in Taiwan. METHODS Health care services for asthma and ambient air pollution data were obtained from the National Health Insurance Research database and Environmental ...

OBJECTIVE To assess whether equity is achieved in use of general practitioner, outpatient, and inpatient services by children and young people according to their ethnic group and socioeconomic background. DESIGN Secondary analysis of the British general household survey, 1991-94. SUBJECTS 20 473 children and young people aged between 0 and 19 years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Consultations wit...

OBJECTIVES To measure expatriates' knowledge of health insurance benefits with respect to outpatient, inpatient, prescription drug, and dental services, and to link this knowledge to sociodemographic and employment characteristic.  Methods: Cross-sectional, face-to-face interviews were conducted from March 2015 to February 2016 with a stratified random sample of 3,398 male insured expatriate wo...