Background Private health insurance is one of the sources of funds for financing health care apart from direct taxes, public insurance and out of pocket payments. Regardless of the choice between a social and private insurance, health insurance ownership has been linked with lower OOP. Thus, health insurance as a type of health care financing, no doubt, will be one of the financing mechanisms i...

BACKGROUND China is reforming the way it finances health care as it moves towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) after the failure of market-oriented mechanisms for health care. Improving financing equity is a major policy goal of health care system during the progression towards universal coverage. METHODS We used progressivity analysis and dominance test to evaluate the financing channels ...

Objective The results of an evaluative longitudinal study, which identified the effects of health care decentralization on health financing in Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru are presented in this article. Methods The methodology had two main phases. In the first, secondary sources of data and documents were analyzed with the following variables: type of decentralization implemented, source of finan...

Questions about whether, and how, giving health aid to governments leads to a reduction in health financing from domestic sources are essential to decisions about which countries receive aid, and whether aid is directed to governments. A 2010 analysis by Lu et al. made the case that for every additional US dollar of development assistance for health (DAH) from 1995 to 2006, government health ex...

The complex financing system that supports health care spending in the US makes estimation of the incidence of financing both daunting and important. A significant portion of financing is embedded in the tax system at all levels of government, while tax expenditures that subsidize private purchases implicitly transfer a large share of financing from private to public revenue sources. We compute...

BACKGROUND Shortage and maldistribution of the health workforce is a major problem in the Thai health system. The expansion of healthcare access to achieve universal health coverage placed additional demand on the health system especially on the health workers in the public sector who are the major providers of health services. At the same time, the reform in hospital payment methods resulted i...

Mental disorders account for a significant and growing proportion of the global burden of disease and yet remain a low priority for public financing in health systems globally. In many low-income countries, formal mental health services are paid for directly by patients out-of-pocket and in middle-income countries undergoing transition there has been a decline in coverage. The paper explores th...

One of the many important ethical issues raised by health care systems is how best to sustain equity. As conflicting individual interests are inevitable within a health care system, issues of fairness are bound to arise. Changes in the structure of a health care system are thus key events that can affect equity in important ways. Using the "Benchmarks of Fairness" approach, we assessed the poss...

the focus on public policy and health equity is discussed in reference to the current global health policy discussion on universal health coverage (uhc). this initiative has strong commitment from the leadership of the international organizations involved, but a lack of policy clarity outside of the health financing component may limit the initiative’s impact on health inequity. in order to add...