A decade ago, a crisis over access to HIV/AIDS treatment was the catalysis for elevating that disease and the other infectious diseases disproportionately affecting the world’s poor as a foreign policy issue, mobilizing billions in global health aid. Now, a new controversy over patented...

Healthcare systems are nowadays facing several challenges starting from an ageing population to a growing demand for more advanced and better healthcare outcomes. This leads to an increase of healthcare costs as well as a need for change in healthcare systems in terms of better and more...

This paper analyzes inequity in health care use in rural Bangladesh using data from a survey conducted by Microinsurance Research Unit (MRU) of the Institute of Microfinance (InM) of about 4,000 households drawn from 120 villages. The study focuses on formal health care use over the 12 months...

Universal Coverage (UC) is associated with better health, equity and financial protection. However low income countries, remains trapped in the out of pocket (OOP) paradigm - for example in Nepal the share of OOP out of total health expenditure is almost 60 percent - with a major challenge being...

“In 2007–2008, comparable health care expenditures stood at $425 Million. Since then, these costs have grown 7 per cent annually… [S]tatus quo growth of 7 percent per year in health care spending is simply not an option. The more we spend on health, the less we are able to address the...

This paper reconsiders the equity issue in Swedish health care utilisation previously analyzed by Gerdtham (Health Economics 6, 303-319, 1997) within the framework of the standard two-part model. Departing from the user/nonuser distinction, we use the more flexible framework of the finite...

Although President Obama and the Democratic Congress were able to pass landmark health legislation, their efforts to reform health care ran into predictable political roadblocks. In a severe recession, taxing business and labor is obviously not helpful to economic recovery. Moreover, an array of...

The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) signature accomplishment was the creation of a statutory right to health care for the uninsured. The ambition and the degree of societal and political debate leading up to the Act’s passage suggests it is a “superstatute,” a rare breed of statute that...

Whether user fees for basic health services should be charged or abolished for the poor has recently been debated. This study examines the impact on child health status of removing user fees in South Africa. Our main innovation is to exploit plausibly exogenous variation in access to free...

Universal access to reproductive health is a target of Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5B, and along with MDG 5A to reduce maternal mortality by three-quarters, progress is currently too slow for most countries to achieve these targets by 2015. Critical to success are increased and sustainable...