Outlays for health care in the Nation reached $192.4 billion in calendar year 1978--13 percent higher than in 1977, according to preliminary figures compiled by the Health Care Financing Administration. This estimate represented $863 per person in the United States and was equal to 9.1 percent of the GNP. This latest report in the annual series representing national health expenditures provides...

P eople’s business credit program (KUR) has been launched to alleviate poverty through provision of micro financing to micro entrepreneurs in Indonesia This study aims to estimate the impact of KUR program using cross-sectional data and propensity score matching technique (PSM). The survey was conducted on 332 household entrepreneurs, consisting of 155 KUR receivers and 177 non-KUR r...

BACKGROUND In order to raise African countries probability of achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015, there is need to increase and more efficiently use domestic and external funding to strengthen health systems infrastructure in order to ensure universal access to quality health care. The objective of this paper is to examine the changes that have occurred in African...

As the first step in a pioneering effort by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) to measure interstate border crossing for services used by both Medicare and non-Medicare beneficiaries, the authors study the spending behavior of Medicare beneficiaries for 10 Medicare-covered services. Based on interstate flow-of-expenditure data developed for calendar year 1991, the authors analyze t...

The Medicare program was first implemented to meet a critical need in American society, and over its thirty-year history it has evolved into an integral part of the U.S. health care system. This DataWatch provides a broad overview of the program, outlining both historical and current trends in coverage, financing, payment mechanisms, beneficiary status, benefits, and spending.

Introduction Recent events in the residential mortgage industry have verified what many of us expected all along: that the bursting of the housing bubble is already exerting dramatic and wide-ranging pressure on the US economy. As the housing market continues to decline, consumer spending will contract and financial institutions will suffer as housingrelated financing instruments take the plunge.

This article provides an overview of current trends in health expenditures in 29 OECD countries and recent revisions of OECD health accounts. U.S. health expenditures are compared with those of other OECD countries. The interactions of cost-containment measures with changes in the public-private mix of financing and in the composition of health care spending are discussed.

This paper examines the performance of Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI), a universal health insurance program, implemented in 1995, that covers comprehensive services. The authors address two key questions: Did the NHI cause Taiwanese health spending to escalate to an "unaffordable" level? What are the benefits of the NHI? They find that Taiwan's single-payer NHI system enabled Taiwan t...