Hospital gradation systems are used to examine the performance of hospitals to promote the efficient use of medical resources (1). Patient-perceived service quality may differ for differing grades of medical institutions under gradation system , which has been rarely reported. The aim of the present study was to explore the relation between the hospital gradation system and patient perceptions ...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between accessibility of healthcare facilities and medical care utilization among the middle-aged and elderly population in Taiwan. DESIGN Cross-sectional study from 2007 Taiwan Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TLSA) survey. SETTING Community-based study. PARTICIPANTS A total of 4249 middle-aged and elderly subjects were rec...

Ten years ago, Cutler and Gruber [Cutler, D., Gruber, J., 1996. Does public health insurance crowdout private insurance? Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, 391-430] suggested that crowd-out might be quite large, but much subsequent research has questioned this conclusion. Our results using improved data and methods clearly show that crowd-out is still significant in the 1996-2002 period. This ...

Changes in individual or family circumstances cause many Americans to experience gaps and transitions in public and private health insurance. Using data from the 2004-2007 Survey of Income and Program Participation, this article updates earlier analyses of insurance gaps and transitions. Eighty-nine million people (one third of nonelderly Americans) were uninsured for at least 1 month during th...

Using both employer- and beneficiary-level data, we examined trends in employer-sponsored retiree health insurance and prospects for future coverage. We found that retiree health insurance has become less prevalent over the past decade, with firms reporting declines in the availability of coverage, and Medicare-eligible retirees reporting lower rates of enrollment. The future of retiree health ...

An insurance scheme covering hospital care in the rural district of Bwamanda in the North-west of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which locally is called the mutuelle, was conceived and developed in 1986 on the initiative of Belgian doctors working in the district under the arrangements for bilateral Belgian aid. After more than 10 years of operation the Bwamanda scheme has achieved a high ra...

introduction: direct cash payments are the principal sources of health care finance in most countries. health services may impose a regressive cost burden on households, especially in developing countries. the purpose of this study was to calculate households encountered with catastrophic healthcare expenditures in qazvin, iran. methods: the statistical society included 100 household equaled to...

Vietnam has pursued universal health insurance coverage for two decades but has yet to fully achieve this goal. This paper investigates the barriers to achieve universal coverage and examines the validity of facilitating factors to shorten the transitional period in Vietnam. A comparative study of facilitating factors toward universal coverage of Vietnam and Korea reveals significant internal f...