BACKGROUND Health inequity is an important issue all around the world. The Chinese basic medical security system comprises three major insurance schemes, namely the Urban Employee Basic Medical Insurance (UEBMI), the Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance (URBMI), and the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS). Little research has been conducted to look into the disparity in payments among the h...

BACKGROUND China has since the beginning of this millennium engaged in substantial Universal Health Coverage (UHC) reforms. This paper adds evidence on how equity in level of health service utilization changed after UHC reforms. METHODS Our study was based on household survey data from 30 counties in Sichuan province in 2004 and 2011. We introduce an unusual outcome variable, namely level of ...

This paper compares the extent to which the principle of "equal treatment for equal need"(ETEN) is maintained in the health care delivery systems of Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. Deviations in the degree to which health care is distributed according to need are measured by an index of horizontal inequity. Income-related inequality in utilization is split into four major sources: (i) direct...

BACKGROUND China's recent growth in income has been unequally distributed, resulting in an unusually rapid retreat from relative income equality, which has impacted negatively on health services access. There exists a significant gap between health care utilization in rural and urban areas and inequality in health care access due to differences in socioeconomic status is increasing. We investig...

Elucidating how inequity aversion (a tendency to dislike and correct unequal outcomes) functions as one develops is important to understanding more complex fairness considerations in adulthood. Although previous research has demonstrated that adults and children reduce inequity, it is unclear if people are actually responding negatively to inequity or if people dislike others getting more than ...

Humans and various nonhuman primates respond negatively to inequity not in their favor (i.e., inequity aversion), when inequity between two individuals is introduced. Common marmosets, a highly prosocial species, further discriminated between human actors who reciprocated in social exchanges, and those who did not. Conversely, marmoset models of autism, induced via prenatal exposure to valproic...

Research using economic games has demonstrated that adults are willing to sacrifice rewards in order to prevent inequity both when they receive less than a social partner (disadvantageous inequity) and when they receive more (advantageous inequity). We investigated the development of both forms of inequity aversion in 4- to 8-year-olds using a novel economic game in which children could accept ...