In a new administration and Congress, any health insurance coverage initiative will focus on some, rather than all, Americans. Because lack of affordability is the main reason people lack coverage, most observers acknowledge that government-financed subsidies are needed to expand coverage. But there is considerable disagreement about how these subsidies should be provided. Here we argue that pr...

About half the growth in real per capita medical spending from 1960 to 1993 and two-thirds of its growth from 1983 to 1993 resulted from either the level or the growth of insurance coverage, chiefly the former. Dividing all factors determining the 1960-1993 growth in real per capita medical spending into two major categories, we find that 70 percent of this growth resulted from cost-increasing ...

The Small Area Health Insurance Estimates (SAHIE) program at the U.S Census Bureau is conducting research regarding the model-based estimation of insurance coverage for counties and has produced experimental estimates. There is widespread interest in estimates of health insurance at geographic levels below the state level. While there are several states that produce estimates of insurance cover...

Workers' compensation insurance provides cash benefits and health care for workers who are injured on the job. This DataWatch considers the costs and benefits of combining the health insurance component of workers' compensation with universal health insurance, creating a twenty-four-hour coverage plan. The paper documents a large potential savings from twenty-four-hour coverage: Workers' compen...

This paper examines how income levels affected the substitution of public health insurance for private health coverage under expansions of Illinois' State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Building on a technique developed by Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003), I estimate that among children whose family incomes are between 200% and 300% of the federal poverty level (FPL), 35% of those co...

The number of uninsured Californians dipped to 6.8 million in 1999, down from 7.3 million in 1998. Despite the good news, more than one in five (22.4%) of the state’s nonelderly residents have no health insurance coverage (Exhibit 1). That is a lower proportion than in 1998 but about the same rate as in 1996 when California had not yet fully recovered from the recession of the early 1990s. This...

OBJECTIVES In recent years, the government of the Philippines embarked upon an ambitious Universal Health Care program, underpinned by the rapid scale-up of subsidized insurance coverage for poor and vulnerable populations. With a view of reducing the stubbornly high maternal mortality rates in the country, the program has a strong focus on maternal health services and is supported by a nationa...

INTRODUCTION Hypertension is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), the leading cause of death in the United States. The treatment and control of hypertension is inadequate, especially among patients without health insurance coverage. The Affordable Care Act offered an opportunity to improve hypertension management by increasing the number of people covered by insurance. This study pre...

Background It has been 20 years since the introduction of health insurance in Sudan. This study was the first one that explored health insurance services in Sudan from the perspectives of the insurers. Methods This was a qualitative, exploratory, interview study. The sampling frame was the list of Social Health Insurance and Private Health Insurance institutions in Sudan. Participants were se...