This paper analyses the Slovak health insurance system and the policy challenges it faces. It describes the structure of health coverage and health sector reforms being implemented by the Slovak government. It provides a preliminary assessment of the possible impact of such reforms, with a focus...

While France has a universal public health insurance system, the coverage it provides is incomplete and the vast majority the French population has private complementary health insurance. Among OECD countries, the share of health care financed by private insurance is third highest behind the US...

This study updates and extends a previous study on equity in physician utilisation for a subset of the countries analyzed here (Van Doorslaer, Koolman and Puffer, 2002). It updates results to 2000 for 13 countries and adds new results for eight countries: Australia, Finland, France, Hungary,...

Dementia and its most common manifestation, Alzheimer’s disease, is a complex disorder that afflicts primarily the elderly, affecting an estimated 10 million people in OECD member countries. The complexity of the disease makes treating dementia extremely difficult, involving a wide variety of...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted primary and secondary prevention efforts as well as routine cancer care including diagnosis and treatment. The number of cancer-related procedures declined across countries. Many of the OECD countries also faced challenges in maintaining and further improving...

Even in wealthy economies, access to medicines is increasingly affected by medicine shortages – an issue exacerbated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this paper was to examine the extent and nature of medicine shortages in OECD countries (pre-COVID-19) and explore the...

Waiting times for elective (non-urgent) surgery are a main health policy concern in approximately half of OECD countries. Mean waiting times for elective surgical procedures are above three months in several countries and maximum waiting times can stretch into years. They generate...

This study presents a broad overview of health-system reforms in OECD countries over the past several decades. Reforms are assessed according to their impact on the following policy goals: ensuring access to needed health-care services; improving the quality of health care and its outcomes;...

Ensuring equal access to the latest cancer medicines is one of the most pressing challenges facing OECD health systems today. Despite the emergence of new oncology drugs, disparities in patient access—particularly through clinical trials and early access programs—remain a critical issue....

Safety is a core dimension of health care quality. Measurement of patient safety culture in OECD countries has been increasingly conducted as part of efforts to monitor patient safety and to contribute to health system performance assessment. Building on four years of work, a second OECD data...