BACKGROUND Out-of-pocket payments in health care have been shown to impose significant burden on households in Sub-Saharan Africa, leading to constrained access to health care and impoverishment. In an effort to reduce the financial burden imposed on households by user fees, some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have abolished user fees in the health sector. Zambia is one of few countries in Sub...

The impact of ageing on health expenditure has recently attracted from policy makers and academics. Majority of studies, however, focus on developed countries, where health care systems are well developed. In China, where old age dependency ratio has grown faster than in most countries and the health care system has moved away from a public to a largely self-financed system, the issue of whethe...

BACKGROUND Physical therapy decreases low back pain, improves function, and may lead to decreased use of medical services. However, factors predicting physical therapy utilization for patients with low back pain are not well understood. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to identify the impact of out-of-pocket expenditure on physical therapy utilization for US adults with nonspecific lo...

according to importance of cirrhosis of the liver and the lack of information about the economic burden of the disease, we performed this study to estimate the economic burden of liver cirrhosis in iran in 2011.the cost-of-illness method, based on the human capital theory, has been used. both direct and indirect costs have been estimated using a prevalence approach and bottom-up method. the inp...

Despite the presence of Medicare, out-of-pocket medical spending is a large expenditure risk facing the elderly. While women live longer than men, elderly women incur higher out-of-pocket medical spending than men at each age. In this paper, we examine whether differences in marital status and living arrangements can explain this difference. We find that out-of-pocket medical spending is approx...