Informal payments for health care services are common in many transition countries, including Russia. While the Russian government proclaims its policy goal of improving access to and quality of free-of-charge health services, it has approved regulations that give local authorities the right to provide services against payment. This paper reports the results of a population-based survey (n = 20...

OBJECTIVE To determine ophthalmologists' views on the Medicare bundled payment model for specialty physicians in the outpatient setting. DESIGN AND METHODS The New England Ophthalmology Society (NEOS) was emailed an anonymous survey. Views of bundled payments and demographic characteristics were analyzed. RESULTS Of responding members, 72% (115/160) strongly opposed bundled payments; 68% (1...

In 1992, the EU initiated the process of decoupling income transfers from agricultural production which has culminated in the 2003 reform of the common agricultural policy (CAP). In this reform 'single farm payments' have been introduced which are based on direct payments during the reference period 2000-2002. We use statistics of such payments to explore the distribution patterns across farm h...

The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 explicitly increased Medicare payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans. As a result, every MA plan in the nation is paid more for its enrollees than they would have been expected to cost in traditional fee-for-service Medicare. The authors calculate that payments to MA plans in 2008 will be 12.4 percent greater than the corresponding costs in trad...

BACKGROUND At the beginning of 2007, health care reforms were implemented in Hungary in order to decrease public expenditure on health care. Reforms involved the increase of co-payments for pharmaceuticals and the introduction of co-payments for health care services. OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper is to examine the progressivity of household expenditure on health care during the reform...

BACKGROUND Patient's Informal payments is among the main source of health care financing in some countries. This paper aimed at determining the patient informal payments and relative factors in Cardiac Surgery Departments (CSD) in hospitals affiliated to Mashhad University of Medical Sciences (MUMS) in 2013. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, 316 discharged patients were selected using mu...