BACKGROUND Overtreatment is a cause of preventable harm and waste in health care. Little is known about clinician perspectives on the problem. In this study, physicians were surveyed on the prevalence, causes, and implications of overtreatment. METHODS 2,106 physicians from an online community composed of doctors from the American Medical Association (AMA) masterfile participated in a survey....

This paper investigates the extent to which private supplementary insurance and Medicaid, which vitiate the effect of Medicare cost-sharing, encourage elderly beneficiaries to seek additional medical care. A multivariate model of health services utilization is estimated with the Tobit technique, using the 1976 Health Interview Survey. We find that either private or public supplementation induce...

This paper is concerned with a comparison of immigrants and Swiss citizens with respect to level of education, labor market outcomes and health care utilization. The evidence is based on data for 1999 from the first wave of the Swiss Household Panel. In order to control for confounding influences, linear and non-linear (negative binomial) regression models are used. The main result is that diff...

The objective of this research was to explore interview data to understand and characterize the nature of brotherhood in a sample of African American men at two historically Black colleges and universities. The authors used thematic analysis on semistructured interview data, collected by an ethnically diverse research team. Recruitment and interviews were conducted at two historically Black col...

BACKGROUND Cross-national comparable data on migrants' use of healthcare services are important to address problems in access to healthcare; to identify high risk groups for prevention efforts; and to evaluate healthcare systems comparatively. Some of the main obstacles limiting analyses of health care utilization are lack of sufficient coverage and availability of reliable and valid healthcare...

ANNALS EDITORIAL the six decades of Indian independence have witnessed too many plans, papers and proposals giving top priority to the health issues in India. Unfortunately, despite huge economic growth, health continues to be the greatest predicament. Even the WHO slogans 'Health for All', 'Millennium Development Goals and more recently 'universal health care have not translated into meaningfu...

Objective: Our retrospective analysis compared costs and patterns of health care utilization by families that included a member with bipolar disorder (“bipolar families”) and by families without serious psychiatric disease (“control families”). Methods: We used the MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters Database covering January 1998 through December 2002. International Classification of D...

BACKGROUND We examine the association between family structure and children's health care utilization, barriers to health care access, health, and schooling and cognitive outcomes and assess whether socioeconomic status (SES) accounts for those family structure differences. We advance prior research by focusing on understudied but increasingly common family structures including single father fa...

OBJECTIVE This study examined whether parenting, specifically parental support, structure, and behavioral control, predicted early childhood health care use and moderated the negative effects of socioeconomic disadvantage. METHODS A sample of 250 parent-child dyads from a longitudinal intergenerational research program participated. RESULTS Greater parental support was associated with incre...