The goal of this paper is to draw attention to the long lasting effect of education on economic outcomes. We use the relationship between education and two routes to early retirement – the receipt of Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and the early claiming of Social Security retirement benefits – to illustrate the long-lasting influence of education. We find that for both men and women ...

The public profile of the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States results not simply from their own interventions in political life, but from the broad array of actions and actors within “public Catholicism” broadly conceived. This article assesses the contemporary profile of the American bishops from this broad angle, particularly in light of new dynamics under the papacy of Francis I. It ...

While Japan's success in achieving universal health insurance over a short period with controlled healthcare costs has been studied from various perspectives, that of beneficiaries have been overlooked. We conducted a secondary analysis of an opinion poll on health insurance in 1967, immediately after reaching universal coverage. We found that people continued to face a slight barrier to health...

Since 1945, the provision of health care in France has been grounded in a social conception promoting universalism and equality. The French health-care system is based on compulsory social insurance funded by social contributions, co-administered by workers' and employers' organisations under State control and driven by highly redistributive financial transfers. This system is described frequen...

M edicare provides health insurance coverage to people with disabilities and chronic illnesses who are entitled to cash benefits under the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program. In most cases, however, these individuals must first wait five months for disability benefits and then an additional two years before they can receive Medicare benefits.We estimate that there were 1.26 mil...

With the establishment of the social security system in 1924, Chile started the path towards UHC. A key milestone was the creation of the National Health System in 1952, which offered public subsidized coverage for the poor [1]. Currently, after the partial privatization of social security in 1981 the health system is mixed, both in insurance and in service provision [2], and health insurance r...

Continued low rates of enrolment in community-based health insurance (CBHI) suggest that strategies proposed for scaling up are unsuccessfully implemented or inadequately address underlying limitations of CBHI. One reason may be a lack of incorporation of social and political context into CBHI policy. In this study, the hypothesis is proposed that values and power relations inherent in social n...

In developed countries, social security covers workers and their dependents against old age, unemployment, health, and other risks. In developing countries, formalsector workers have access to social insurance, and the very poor have some access to social assistance and health services, but large population groups are not covered. Extending social security coverage would require delinking socia...

South Korea introduced mandatory social health insurance for industrial workers in large corporations in 1977, and extended it incrementally to the self-employed until it covered the entire population in 1989. Thirty years of national health insurance in Korea can provide valuable lessons on key issues in health care financing policy which now face many low- and middle-income countries aiming t...