This qualitative research using the focus group approach has gathered pertinent perceptions from the stakeholders in Chinese elderly care environment, including community-based and institutionalised elderly, medical providers, administrators and governmental officials. The study found that the...

This paper shows how complexity theory can better enable hospitals to prepare for bioterrorism events. It briefly explains the major theoretical dimensions of complexity theory and Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and shows how healthcare is best viewed as a CAS. It then looks at the specific...

This study, done on the 10th anniversary of the Taiwan National Health Insurance programme, examines five health policy and payment reforms, including case payment, separation of drug prescription and dispensing, reasonable outpatient volumes, hospital global budgeting, and self-governing...

Reforming Medicaid is a longstanding goal of policymakers that has received intense interest in recent years. Much of this reform has not been guided or informed by rigorous policy research. A notable exception to this is the introduction and expansion of managed care for Medicaid beneficiaries...

This paper uses a benefit incidence analysis (BIA) to evaluate whether public health expenditure in Ecuador is regressive or progressive. This paper overcomes several limitations of previous BIA analyses in developing countries: a) it develops a framework to allocate the operational and...

Although the high percentage of the uninsured is an important public policy issue, discrepancies in both state and national estimates of the numbers of uninsured are reported. There is a critical need to address the methodological problem of the estimation. This study compares four advanced...

Hospitals in California have argued that because of hospital competition and managed care, their costs have increased faster than their revenues. By developing a payer-specific Case Mix Index (CMI) for Medi-Cal, California's Medicaid programme, this study attempts to test the hospitals'...

This research locates the use of public private partnerships (PPP) within the new public management (NPM) reforms that have swept the Australian public sector. Empirical evidence from policy documents and a case study of a failed public hospital project in Victoria are used to illustrate...

This article reviews the establishment and use of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Ireland. It notes the many difficulties experienced in obtaining a precise view of the composition of the Irish public sector and comments on ambivalent (and therefore often destructive) attitudes to the control...

In recent years, the local government sector in European countries has undergone important changes involving, among other things, the externalisation of local public service provision through various forms of corporatisation, public-public collaboration, public-private partnerships and...