BACKGROUND The Chiranjeevi Yojana (CY) is a large public-private partnership program in Gujarat, India, under which the state pays private sector obstetricians to provide childbirth services to poor and tribal women. The CY was initiated statewide in 2007 because of the limited ability of the public health sector to provide emergency obstetric care and high out-of-pocket expenditures in the pri...

Because the health sector makes up a large share of the U.S. economy, widespread price changes for medical services can impact overall inflation significantly. Cuts to public healthcare spending spill over directly and indirectly to private spending. A recent estimate suggests the full effect of the Medicare payment cuts from the 2011 Budget Control Act resulted in a decline of 0.24 percentage ...

While homeland security is widely seen as an important national objective, the costs of this effort are not well understood. An analysis of public and private expenditures on homeland security shows that overall spending rose by $34 billion between 2001 and 2005—a clear increase but one that represents a gain of only 1⁄4 of 1 percent as a share of U.S. GDP. Private sector expenditures increased...

BACKGROUND This study analyzed several political determinants of increased private-sector management in Brazilian health care. In Brazil, the poor depend almost exclusively on the public Unified Health System (the SUS), which remains severely underfunded. Given the overhead costs associated with privately contracted health services, increased private management is one driver of higher expenditu...

We investigate a government financed voucher program that allows all Americans to buy health insurance in the private insurance market. We investigate whether health insurance vouchers are able to increase the number of people with health insurance and decrease aggregate health care spending that threatens the solvency of Medicare and Medicaid. We develop a multi-generation dynamic general equi...

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...

and 16.2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, are projected to reach $4 trillion in 2015 and 20 percent of GDP. Approximately 31 percent of health care costs are administrative, 35 percent are elderly consumed, 75 percent relate to chronic disease management and 25 percent relate to spending linked to risky behaviors. These expenditures are expected to continue to be nearly evenly split ...

This paper summarizes eight country studies of inequality in the health sector. The analyses use household data to examine the distribution of service use and health expenditures. Each study divides the population into "income" quintiles, estimated using consumption expenditures. The studies measure inequality in the use of and spending on health services. Richer groups are found to have a high...