In October 2011 the Belgian Fund for Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs, a consortium of stakeholders supported by the King Baudouin Foundation, handed over the recommendations and proposed measures for a Belgian Plan for Rare Diseases. In follow-up of the EU recommendations to issue national plans by 2013, the Minister of Public Health and Social Affairs commissioned the Fund to propose a comprehe...

BACKGROUND China is actively promoting regulation of rare diseases, rare disease and orphan drugs have been formally incorporated into the national planning. However, few studies have been done to evaluate the affordability of rare disease patients in China. This study aims to provide policy recommendations for the establishment of social security mechanism for rare diseases in China, so as to ...

BACKGROUND Obesity is a multifaceted problem with wide-reaching medical, social and economic consequences. While health consequences are much known, but due to paucity of data, economic consequences are less known in India. The prevalence for excessive weight particularly among women population has been increasing dramatically in India in the last decades. We examined the economic burden on ind...

Introduction All nations are striving for development. Economic development is one of the main parts of development process, but not all of it. Populations health is one of the main factors of economic development, and child’s mortality is one of the main factors of population health status. The aim of this study is investigating the role of socioeconomic disparties in under 5 mortality in East...

BACKGROUND Health literacy presents an enormous challenge in the delivery of effective healthcare and quality outcomes. We evaluated the impact of low health literacy (LHL) on healthcare utilization and healthcare expenditure. METHODS Database analysis used Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) from 2005-2008 which provides nationally representative estimates of healthcare utilization and e...

Since 1984 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has sponsored a series of conferences to discuss improvements to national health expenditure account (NHEA) activities. This article summarizes the 2005 conference and highlights changes made since the previous conference, commissioned papers on future directions for NHEA projects, and participant recommendations.