This paper compares egalitarian concepts of fairness in health care payments (requiring that payments be linked to ability to pay or ATP) and minimum standards approaches (requiring that payments do not exceed a pre-specified proportion of pre-payment income, or do not drive households into poverty). We develop indices for both sets of approaches. In the first, we compare the “agnostic” approac...

This paper studies the impact of health insurance on individual out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure in China. Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey data between 1991 and 2006, we apply two-part and sample selection models that address key empirical challenges: censored data and selection on unobservables. We find that although the probability of positive OOP health expenditures increas...

OBJECTIVE The Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act required health plans to provide mental health and substance use disorder (MH/SUD) benefits on par with medical benefits beginning in 2010. Previous research found that parity significantly lowered average out-of-pocket (OOP) spending on MH/SUD treatment of children. No evidence is available on how pari...

BACKGROUND China's health system reform launched in early 2000s has achieved better coverage of health insurance and significantly increased the use of healthcare for vast majority of Chinese population. This study was to examine changes in the structure of total health expenditures in China in 2000-2011, and to investigate the financial burden of healthcare placed on its population, particular...

BACKGROUND This study investigates the effects of a new medical insurance payment system for hospice patients in palliative care programs and analyzes length of survival (LoS) determinants. METHOD At the Pusan National University Hospital hospice center, between January 2015 and April 2016, 276 patients were hospitalized with several diagnosed types of terminal stage cancer. This study separa...

Objective. This research aimed to determine the in-patient expenditure of COVID-19 adult patient s and their out-of-pocket (OOP) payments at University Philippines-Philippine General Hospital (UP-PGH) after new PhilHealth case rate coverage was instituted last 15 April 2020. It also intended present preliminary data on expenses incurred by COVID patients during initial phase pandemic in country...

In this paper we explore the potential of future health services administrative data systems to improve the measurement of poverty. We first discuss the current and proposed new methods of measuring poverty, focusing on the need and the difficulty in capturing out-of-pocket medical (OOP) costs in the context of a survey focused on economic issues. We then discuss a current data collection effor...

We estimate the distributional incidence of health care financing in 13 Asian territories that account for 55% of the Asian population. In all territories, higher-income households contribute more to the financing of health care. The better-off contribute more as a proportion of ability to pay in most low- and lower-middle-income territories. Health care financing is slightly regressive in thre...

Background Access to appropriate and affordable healthcare is needed to achieve better health outcomes in Africa. However, access to healthcare remains low, especially among the poor. In Zambia, poor access exists despite the policy by the government to remove user fees in all primary healthcare facilities in the public sector. The paper has two main objectives: (i) to examine the factors assoc...