Is su e Br ie f ® • This Issue Brief analyzes recent literature about trends in the employment-based health care benefits system, proposed “market-driven” approaches to health care financing, and implications for consumers of the effect of rising costs on employment-based benefits. It examines the readiness of consumers to become more responsible for making health care financing decisions on th...

This paper employs a distribution-free statistical test suitable for comparisons based on dependent samples to analyse changes in health care financing distributions on Finnish data. In distinction to the more general summary index approach used in most studies of progressivity measurement, the difference between the Lorenz curve of income inequality and the concentration curves of various taxe...

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...

INTRODUCTION Mental health disorders (especially psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia) constitute the leading cause of disabilityadjusted life years (DALYs) from all non-communicable diseases (1). These disorders relate to severe social, educational and occupational impairment, physical illness, and premature mortality (2). Approximately, three-quarters of the burden of mental illness come...

There is a wide variety of ethical arguments for public financing of health care that share a common structure built on a series of four logically related propositions regarding: (1) the ultimate purpose of a human life or human society; (2) the role of health and its distribution in society in advancing this ultimate purpose; (3) the role of access to or utilisation of health care in maintaini...

This paper employs the method of Aronson et al. (1994) to decompose the redistributive effect of the Dutch health care financing system into three components: a progressivity component, a classical horizontal equity component and a reranking component. Results are presented for the health care financing system as a whole, as well as for its constituent parts. A final section sets out to uncover...

Epilepsy is one of the most common and widespread neurological disorders. Recent estimates suggest that it accounts for 1% of the global burden of disease [1] and affects over 65 million people [2]. In addition, because the relatives and friends of people with epilepsy (PWE) also bear the burden of this condition, more than 500 million people are indirectly affected by epilepsy [3]. Thus, epile...

The emergence of investor-owned firms as major actors in U.S. health care financing and delivery has led to calls for federal and state intervention to protect nonprofits and to stem the for-profit sector's growth. High-profile scandals involving some of these firms have lent urgency to such proposals. This paper considers the case for government intervention to protect the nonprofit health sec...

The 1993-94 effort to reform the U.S. health care financing system focused on the problems associated with escalating medical costs and a growing population of persons without health insurance. Although comprehensive reforms were not enacted, these problems persist. In addition, changes in the private insurance market directed at containing costs and the political focus on deficit reduction may...