INTRODUCTION The Democratic Republic of the Congo is today one of the poorest countries in the world; the health status of the population ranks among the worst in Sub-Saharan Africa. Public health services charge user fees and drug prices. Since 2008, north-eastern Congo is facing a guerrilla war. Malteser International is assisting with free health care for internally displaced persons as well...

Publicly financed health care provides access to a package of valuable core services to all Canadians—services that provide necessary care when needed and help improve the health and well-being of Canadians. In addition to being a valuable public service, publicly financed health care plays another role that is often overlooked: it redistributes income among different socio-economic groups. In ...

Is su e Br ie f ® • This Issue Brief analyzes recent literature about trends in the employment-based health care benefits system, proposed “market-driven” approaches to health care financing, and implications for consumers of the effect of rising costs on employment-based benefits. It examines the readiness of consumers to become more responsible for making health care financing decisions on th...

Rapid growth in the share of the nation's gross national product devoted to health expenditure has heightened concern over the survival of government entitlement programs and has led to debate of the desirability of current methods of financing health care. In this article, the authors present the data at the heart of the issue, quantifying spending for various types of health care in 1982 and ...

BACKGROUND This paper investigates knowledge of Community Health Insurance (CHI) and the perception of its relevance by key policy makers and health service managers in Uganda. Community Health Insurance schemes currently operate in the private-not-for-profit sector, in settings where church-based facilities function. They operate in a wider policy environment where user fees in the public sect...

This paper employs a distribution-free statistical test suitable for comparisons based on dependent samples to analyse changes in health care financing distributions on Finnish data. In distinction to the more general summary index approach used in most studies of progressivity measurement, the difference between the Lorenz curve of income inequality and the concentration curves of various taxe...

This paper employs the method of Aronson et al. (1994) to decompose the redistributive effect of the Dutch health care financing system into three components: a progressivity component, a classical horizontal equity component and a reranking component. Results are presented for the health care financing system as a whole, as well as for its constituent parts. A final section sets out to uncover...

This study examines whether private financing erodes public support for maintaining health care budgets in the public sector. It also examines the hypothesis that private financing reduces the real value of nominal government health care budgets by contributing to higher health care costs. The statistical analysis focuses on a set of OECD countries for the 1980s. The results provide little supp...

ew York’s need for long-term care is particularly significant. In 1996, elderly New Yorkers comprised 13 percent of the state’s population, a figure expected to grow to about 16 percent by 2020. The state also ranks first in the percentage of elderly who are on Medicaid— 22 percent in 1996—creating high pressure on this public component of the long-term care financing system. A profile of the s...

Background Private health insurance is one of the sources of funds for financing health care apart from direct taxes, public insurance and out of pocket payments. Regardless of the choice between a social and private insurance, health insurance ownership has been linked with lower OOP. Thus, health insurance as a type of health care financing, no doubt, will be one of the financing mechanisms i...