A voluntary insurance scheme for hospital care was launched in 1986 in the Bwamanda District in northwest Zaire. The paper briefly reviews the rationale, design and implementation of the scheme and discusses its results and performance over time. The scheme succeeded in generating stable revenue for the hospital in a context where government intervention was virtually absent and external subsid...

Farmers’ decisions about how much crop insurance to buy are not generally consistent with either expected profit or utility maximization. They do not pick coverage levels that maximize expected subsidy nor do they demand full insurance coverage. In addition, the absolute size ...

W e consider a supply chain with a supplier that sells to a retailer under a revenue-sharing arrangement. Demand is uncertain and unobservable to the supplier. We assume that the retailer is rational, that is, the retailer behaves opportunistically and underreports sales revenues to the supplier whenever such underreporting is profitable. Assuming the supplier has the ability to audit the retai...

Is the historical development of the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program unique or similar to the development of social security programs in other industrialized countries? The U.S. Social Security program was adopted some 40 to 50 years after those of most Western European nations. The United States thus had the opportunity to choose from a number of models and clearly...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) provides tax credits and subsidies for the purchase of qualifying health insurance plans on state-run insurance exchanges. Contrary to expectations, many states are refusing or otherwise failing to create such exchanges. An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rule purports to extend these tax credits and subsidies to the purchase of health insur...

In the employer-sponsored insurance market that covers most Americans; many workers are "underinsured." The evidence shows onerous out-of-pocket payments causing them to forgo needed care, miss work, and fall into bankruptcies and foreclosures. Nonetheless, many higher-paid workers are "overinsured": the evidence shows that in this domain, surplus insurance stimulates spending and price inflati...

BACKGROUND Although the increasing number of recommended immunizations is essential for patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the potentially uncompensated costs of expanded immunizations will present significant challenges for clinics and health systems serving HIV-infected patients. METHODS We estimated costs of providing Gardasil, Prevnar, and Zostavax to eligible pati...