The Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act (MMA) provides the largest benefit expansion in Medicare's history while enacting major changes to the program's structure. Offering $410 billion in new drug benefits will certainly help many beneficiaries now struggling with the costs of prescriptions, particularly those with low incomes. It is difficult to determine, however, wh...

In 1975, Social Security beneficiaries were given the option of having their monthly benefit payments sent directly to their banks through an electronic funds transfer system. Since then, beneficiaries have been enrolling in this program in rapidly increasing numbers. At the end of 1976, fewer than 5 million beneficiaries--14 percent of the total--were enrolled in the program. By the end of 198...

Using data from 335,249 Medicare beneficiaries who responded to the 2007 Medicare Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey, along with data from 22 cognitive interviews, we investigated the reliability and validity of an instrument designed to assess beneficiaries' experiences with their prescription drug plans. Composite measures derived from the instrument had ac...

BACKGROUND Medical spending on psychiatric hospitalization has been reported to impose a tremendous socio-economic burden on many developed countries with public health insurance programmes. However, there has been no in-depth study of the factors affecting psychiatric inpatient medical expenditures and differentiated these factors across different types of public health insurance programmes. I...

BACKGROUND The Bolsa Família Program was created in Brazil in 2003, by the joint of different social programs aimed at poor or very poor families with focus on income transfer to promote immediate poverty relief, conditionalities and complementary programs. Given the contributions of conditional cash transfer programs to poverty alleviation and their potential effects on nutrition and health, t...

The study aimed at examining the effect of loan utilization on the output of youth rice farmers in Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State. The specific objectives are to determine the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents, determine whether there is significant difference in output of the beneficiaries and non beneficiaries and compare the mean output of the youth farmers with...

1Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospitals Complex, Nigeria 2Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Ekiti State University College of Medicine, Nigeria 3Department of Microbiology, Federal Teaching Hospital, Nigeria 4Department of Family Medicine, University of Abuja Teaching Hospital, Nigeria 5Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Babcock Un...