Retail sales of prescription drugs totaled $154.5 billion in 2001. The National Institute for Health Care Management estimates annual sales will exceed $400 billion by the year 2010. This paper analyzes the welfare and distributional effects of two policy families that could be used to cope with high and rising pharmaceutical costs. We employ a general-equilibrium approach to contrast the curre...

Executive Summary Massachusetts is not the first to mandate that everyone buy insurance as a way to achieve universal health coverage, and is not the first to get queasy about seeing that solution through. Like Americans, the Swiss were not eager to accept the double principles of universal coverage and a mandate on individuals: it took almost a century before these two elements were added to t...

INTRODUCTION Many countries from the European region, which moved from a government financed and provided health system to social health insurance, would have had the risk of moving away from universal health coverage if they had followed a "traditional" approach. The Eastern European high-income countries studied in this paper managed to avoid this potential pitfall by using state budget reven...

OBJECTIVE Women who are immigrants or socioeconomically disadvantaged have been found to have significantly lower cervical cancer screening rates than their peers in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The objective of this study was to examine rates of appropriate cervical cancer screening among women living in Ontario, Canada, using recent registration with Ontario's universal health insurance plan as ...

In 2003, the Mexican government took a step toward greater parity in its health system. The stubbornly fragmented health sector remains fragmented, but a new health insurance program to fund basic preventive and curative services was created to cover nearly half of the population which had previously been without effective insurance coverage. The “Seguro Popular,” (SP) the medical care componen...

The current health insurance system in Egypt targets the productive population through an employment-based scheme bounded by a cost ceiling and focusing on curative care. Egypt Social Contract Survey data from 2005 were used to evaluate the impact of the employment-based scheme on health system accessibility and financing. Only 22.8% of the population in the productive age range (19-59 years) b...

The United States has a unique system of health care delivery compared with other developed countries around the world. Almost all other developed countries have universal health insurance programs in which the government plays a dominant role. Almost all of the citizens in these countries are entitled to receive health care services that include routine and basic health care. In contrast, only...

A common assumption is that access to care is more equitably distributed among income groups in countries that provide universal, publicly funded health insurance than in countries that do not. But does universal health coverage really eliminate disparities among income groups? Findings from The Commonwealth Fund 1998 International Health Policy Survey suggest that countries with universal cove...