The Asia-Pacific region is confronted with several emerging healthrelated issues. The prevalence of diseases causing high rates of mortality and morbidity, and the lack of skilled health personnel, infrastructure, financial resources and health systems that are responsive to the needs of...

With its transition to a market-oriented economy, China has gone through significant changes in health care delivery and financing systems in the last three decades. Since 1998, a new public health insurance program for urban employees, called Basic Medical Insurance Program (BMI), has been...

Health insurance affects the rate at which individuals visit hospitals and emergency departments (EDs). We identify the causal effect of losing health insurance using a regression discontinuity design. We compare individuals just before and after their twenty third birthday, which insurers have...

The Netherlands, as other OECD countries, faces the challenge of providing high quality health and long-term care services to an ageing population in a cost-efficient manner. In the health care sector, reforms have aimed at introducing more competition. Despite major changes and some positive...

The efficiency of Turkish health system, which was restructured by the health transformation framework, depends on the mutual compliance of both health service providers and demanders. The future and success of the new health system may be determined by solving problems that were generated from...

This chapter reviews the literature devoted to studying markets for health care services and health insurance. There has been tremendous growth and progress in this field. A tremendous amount of new research has been done since the publication of the first volume of this Handbook. In addition,...

Medicare is a costly and rapidly growing program. At currently projected growth rates, it is the wild card in the debate over the political viability of social security. Further, the all-important Medicare growth rate is very hard to predict. Forecasting the pension aspect of Social Security is...

Between 1915 and 1920, 18 U.S. states considered the introduction of compulsory health insurance. Given the alleged deficiencies of voluntary arrangements for insuring sickness, reformers expected social insurance to be welfare enhancing for American wage-workers since it would result in lower...

We evaluate the demand for long term care (LTC) insurance prospects in a stated preference context, by means of the results of a choice experiment carried out on a representative sample of the Emilia-Romagna population. Choice modelling techniques have not been used yet for studying the demand...

Deductibles in health insurance are often regarded as a means to contain health care costs when individuals exhibit moral hazard. However, in the absence of moral hazard, voluntarily chosen deductibles may instead lead to self-selection into different insurance contracts. We use a set of new...