BACKGROUND The inequity caused by health financing in Vietnam, which mainly relies on out-of-pocket payments, has put pre-payment reform high on the political agenda. This paper reports on a study of the willingness to pay for health insurance among a rural population in northern Vietnam, exploring whether the Vietnamese are willing to pay enough to sufficiently finance a health insurance syste...

America’s public health insurance programs reflect a deeply rooted commitment to caring for low-income families and children. This article chronicles the evolution of Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), two public programs designed to provide free or low-cost health coverage to lowincome children who do not have access to private health insurance. Such a historic...

This paper revisits the link between health insurance and health by estimating a model that allows for insurance and health to be linked through both dynamic and contemporaneous channels, each with di¤erent policy implications. The model produces two main …ndings. First, while insurance and health appear to be negatively related dynamically, they are positively related contemporaneously, with p...

Financial transfers provided to individuals from friends and family members in times of need are difficult to measure, yet the role of private, informal assistance in determining economic outcomes is important to identify, as private transfers may serve as a source of insurance for households. In this paper, I use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to measure the e...