BACKGROUND Complementary Universal Health insurance (CMUC) providing free access to health care has been available in France, since 2000 for people with an annual income <50% of the poverty threshold. METHODS Data were derived from the French national health insurance reimbursements and short-stay admissions database for 2007 (80% of subjects under the age of 60 years in France, including 4.8...

BACKGROUND The drug benefit plan of Thailand's Civil Servant Medical Benefit Scheme (CSMBS) must be amended to control increasing costs; to that end, it is important to gather the views of beneficiaries before making changes to the benefit plan. OBJECTIVES To examine the relative importance of attributes of drug benefit plans from the perspective of CSMBS beneficiaries. METHODS Attributes a...

In December 2008, 8 in 10 rural Medicare beneficiaries had creditable prescription drug coverage, and over half of these beneficiaries were enrolled in a prescription drug coverage option offered through the Medicare Part D program (Figure 1). However, the array of coverage patterns for rural and urban beneficiaries is strikingly different. Rural beneficiaries are more likely to enroll in stand...

OBJECTIVE To determine medical needs, demographic characteristics and healthcare utilisation patterns of the top 1% and top 2%-5% high-cost beneficiaries in the Netherlands. DESIGN Cross-sectional study using 1 year claims data. We broke down high-cost beneficiaries by demographics, the most cost-incurring condition per beneficiary and expensive treatment use. SETTING Dutch curative health ...

The Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey is a powerful tool for analyzing the Medicare population. Based on a stratified random sample of about 16,000 beneficiaries, the Access to Care File provides detailed information on types of supplemental insurance held by Medicare beneficiaries. The insurance counts are a point in time estimate based on interviews conducted with community-dwelling benefic...

On January 1, 2006, the Medicare program began offering prescription drug coverage (Medicare Part D) to over 42 million Medicare beneficiaries. This policy brief provides a first snapshot of enrollment in rural and urban areas across the United States and outlines the early findings from an analysis of plans available to rural persons under Medicare's Part D program. The data in this brief will...

This study assessed the activities of GIZ (German International Corporation) intervention technology on shea nut processors in Niger State, Nigeria. A two-stage sampling technique was adopted for study. The first stage involved a purposive selection 15 Local Government Areas GIZ’s intervention. second proportionate random 297 beneficiaries constituting 10% profile list. Also, same LGAs, snow-ba...

1. Unified Beneficiaries Database In 2003, a unified Beneficiaries Database was created, including beneficiaries of the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH), National Social Security Fund (NSSF), Civil Servants Cooperative (CSC), Army, Internal Security Forces (ISF), General Security Forces (GSF) and State Security Forces (SSF). The unification of beneficiaries information implied that doublecovera...

Efforts to study racial variations in access to health care for minorities other than black persons have been hampered by a paucity of data. The Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) has made efforts in the past few years to enhance the racial codes on the Medicare enrollment files to include Hispanic, Asian American, and Native American designations. This study examines hospitalization r...