In efforts to decrease emergency department (ED) crowding and health care costs, frequent users of ED services have been targeted for interventions to decrease their utilization. Previous studies have had different definitions for frequent users and have considered all frequent users as a...

Drug abuse and transmission of HIV during pregnancy are public health problems that adversely affect pregnant women, their children and surrounding communities. Programs that address this vulnerable population have the ability to be cost-effective due to resulting cost savings for mother, child...

Responding to Eugene Volokh, Medical Self-Defense, Prohibited Experimental Therapies, and Payment for Organs, 120 Harv. L. Rev. 1813 (2007) Professor Volokh argues for a constitutional right to medical self-defense for two purposes: first, to allow terminally ill patients to purchase, at their...

Objective: To study cross-national inequalities in mortality of adults and of children aged 5 years using a novel approach, with clustering techniques to stratify countries into mortality groups (better-off, worse-off, mid-level) and to examine risk factors associated with inequality. Design,...

Background: A world divided by health inequalities poses ethical challenges for global health. International and national responses to health disparities must be rooted in ethical values about health and its distribution; this is because ethical claims have the power to motivate, delineate...

South Africa’s government disability grants are considered important in providing income support to low-income AIDS patients. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals may opt to compromise their health by foregoing highly active antiretroviral treatment (HAART) to remain...

The public health and development communities understand clearly the need to integrate anti-poverty efforts with HIV/AIDS programs. This article reports findings about the impact of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) process on Malawi’s National HIV/AIDS Strategic Framework (NSF). In...

The 21st century global health landscape requires effective global action in the face of globalization of trade, travel, information, human rights, ideas, and disease. The new global health era is more plural, comprising a number of key actors, and requiring more coordination of effort,...

The years 2003-2004 marked the tenth anniversary of the rapid rise and demise of the Clinton administration's health reform efforts. Health reform may again be a political issue in the 2008 congressional and presidential elections. However, analysts still disagree over why large-scale health...

The uncertainty of health need, catastrophic costs of medical care, and risk-averse nature of individuals place risk pooling at the center of health-care financing. For a variety of reasons, however, many health systems in low- and middle-income countries do not take advantage of risk pooling....