While Japan's success in achieving universal health insurance over a short period with controlled healthcare costs has been studied from various perspectives, that of beneficiaries have been overlooked. We conducted a secondary analysis of an opinion poll on health insurance in 1967, immediately after reaching universal coverage. We found that people continued to face a slight barrier to health...

BACKGROUND China is reforming the way it finances health care as it moves towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) after the failure of market-oriented mechanisms for health care. Improving financing equity is a major policy goal of health care system during the progression towards universal coverage. METHODS We used progressivity analysis and dominance test to evaluate the financing channels ...

Historically, the Israeli health care system has been considered a high-performance system, providing universal, affordable, high-quality care to all residents. However, a decline in the ratio of physicians to population that reached a modern low in 2006, an approximate ten-percentage-point decline in the share of publicly financed health care between 1995 and 2009, and legislative mandates tha...

A wide variety of social protection systems coexist within the EU. Some member states provide social insurance that is of Beveridgean inspiration (with universal and more or less flat benefits), while others offer a system that is mainly Bismarckian (with benefits related to past contributions). Labor mobility raises concerns about the sustainability of the most generous and redistributive (Bev...

This article reviewed achievements and challenges of the National Health Insurance of the Republic of Korea and shared thoughts on its future directions. Starting with large workplaces of 500 or more employees in 1977, Korea's National Health Insurance successfully achieved universal coverage within just 12 yr in 1989. This amazing pace of growth was possible due to a positive combination of st...

There are numerous studies investigating the effect of health insurance on healthcare utilisation, but there is little empirical evidence examining private objective outcomes in a universal public system. Tracking each individual’s status using panel data, we explore whether difference probability contracting critical illness or becoming disabled between privately insured and uninsured. The ana...

O of the major social policy issues facing the United States in the first decade of the twenty-first century is the large number of Americans lacking health insurance. While other industrialized nations guarantee universal health care for their citizens, 47 million persons in the United States, or 18 percent of the nonelderly population (the elderly are universally covered under the Medicare pr...

BACKGROUND Forty-one million Americans have no health insurance and, despite the growth of managed care, medical costs are again increasing rapidly. One proposed solution is a single-payer health care financing system with universal coverage. Yet, physicians' views of such a system have not been well studied. METHODS We surveyed a random sample of physicians (from the American Medical Associa...

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...

South Korea is one of the world's most rapidly industrializing countries. Along with industrialization has come universal health insurance. Within the span of 12 years, South Korea went from private voluntary health insurance to government-mandated universal coverage. Since 1997, with the intervention of the International Monetary Fund, Korean national health insurance (NHI) has experienced def...