Background: Patient Access Schemes (PAS) are alternative market access agreements between the UK Department of Health and drug manufacturers. They are implemented to enable the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to recommend expensive medicines for use in the UK NHS....

Many low- and middle-income countries continue to search for better ways of financing their health systems. Common to many of these systems are problems of inadequate resource mobilisation, as well as inefficient and inequitable use of existing resources. The poor and other vulnerable groups who...

The Chinese pharmaceutical market is large in absolute size (the second largest in Asia), but it faces similar problems to those that plague other developing countries, such as a lack of adequate patent protection, low pharmaceutical spending per capita, but high pharmaceutical expenditure as a...

A strong association between lower socioeconomic status and worse health has been documented within many countries, but little work has been done to compare the strength of this relationship across countries. We compare the strength of the relationship between income and self-reported health in...

Several low- and middle-income countries are interested in extending their existing health insurance for specific groups to eventually cover their entire populations. For those countries interested in such an extension, it is important to understand what characterises a well performing social...

Background: The debate on access to new drugs has focused on the time lag between applications for approval and granting of marketing authorisation. This delay was identified as the first barrier with respect to patient access to new drugs, encompassing the hurdles of safety, efficacy and...