CONTEXT Donor organs are a scarce gift. Additionally, transplantation is very expensive and the United States lacks universal health insurance for all citizens. These facts combine to make personal finance and insurance some of the criteria for wait listing at US transplant centers. Previous research has shown that the poor and the uninsured (as well as women and nonwhites) are less likely to r...

BACKGROUND Shenzhen's rapid growth and urbanisation has attracted a large, mobile, migrant working population. This article explores health protection through the means of social health insurance between migrants and registrants and their point of access to healthcare. METHODS A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted in Shenzhen, with a random sample of 793 registered and 750 non-...

BACKGROUND Many countries striving to achieve universal health insurance coverage have done so by means of multiple health insurance funds covering different population groups. However, existence of multiple health insurance funds may also cause variation in access to health care, due to the differential revenue raising capacities and benefit packages offered by the various funds resulting in i...

Editorial To achieve universal health insurance coverage, China has launched three phases of health care system reforms. The first round of reforms was embarked on in the mid-1980s with the introduction of market incentives. The second round began in 1997 with the introduction of the Urban Employee Basic Medical Insurance (UEBMI) scheme which provided health insurance coverage to all urban work...

There are fragmentations in Iran’s health insurance system. Multiple health insurance funds exist, without adequate provisions for transfer or redistribution of cross subsidy among them. Multiple risk pools, including several private secondary insurance schemes, have resulted in a tiered health insurance system with inequitable benefit packages for different segments of the population. Also fra...