BACKGROUND The population of Ghana is increasingly becoming urbanized with about 70 % of the estimated 26.9 million people living in urban and peri-urban areas. Nonetheless, eight out of the ten regions in Ghana remain predominantly rural where only 32.1 % of the national health sector workforce works. Doctor-patient ratio in a predominantly rural region is about 1:18,257 compared to 1:4,099 in...

BACKGROUND China is in the process of integrating the new cooperative medical scheme (NCMS) and the urban residents' basic medical insurance system (URBMI) into the urban and rural residents' basic medical insurance system (URRBMI). However, how to integrate the financing policies of NCMS and URBMI has not been described in detail. This paper attempts to illustrate the differences between the f...

BACKGROUND Although expected to act as gate-keeping primary care providers, as community health service (CHS) facilities are severely under-utilized; Chinese people in both rural and urban areas used predominantly higher-tier facilities for primary care purpose, with significant financial and outcome consequences. This study intends to explore the determinants of initial utilization of CHS amon...

This article asks ‘who gets what, when and how’ from China’s recent social welfare expansion. Little research to date examines the overall landscape of China’s social health insurance, which has changed dramatically since 2003, and the distributive consequences and implications thereof. Drawing on public survey data and fieldwork for empirical support, this article finds that China’s recent soc...

Background Access to quality obstetric care is considered essential to reducing maternal and new-born mortality. We evaluated the effect of the introduction of a multifaceted voluntary health insurance programme on hospital deliveries in rural Nigeria. Methods We used an interrupted time-series design, including a control group. The intervention consisted of providing voluntary health insuran...

The aim of this study was to meet the health insurance coverage received by recent graduates of universities in Lima during the Service Rural and Urban-Marginal in Health (SERUMS) during 2012-2013. 290 physicians were included. Data of the physicians' insurance to the social health Insurance (EsSalud) were reviewed monthly. 6.6% of physicians had been activated his insurance at the end of the t...

This chapter analyzes adverse selection in micro health insurance. Health insurance is typically family-based to limit adverse selection within households. I investigate whether such selection occurs empirically, using the case of an individual-based micro health insurance program in rural Nigeria. The empirical analysis applies two-sample two-stage least squares and uses household fixed e↵ects...

Rural populations experience higher rates of illness, less access to health care resources, and lower rates of health insurance coverage than do urban populations. A need exists to identify and address the health care needs of rural communities and other isolated populations and to contextualize the findings in the larger rural health environment. Critical ethnography combined with community-ba...

This article provides an overview of the current Chinese health care system with particular emphasis on rural-urban differences. China's post-1978 economic reforms, although they improved general living standards, created some unintended consequences, as evidenced by the disintegration of the rural cooperative medical system and the sharp reduction in the number of "barefoot doctors", both of w...

Many risks are present in rural developing economies: illness, weather, the sudden need to finance an investment opportunity, etc. Yet for many households in rural developing economies, consumption and investment are insured against short-term, idiosyncratic risks to a large extent, despite limited availability of formal banking and insurance products. The importance of kinship networks in faci...