Background: Cost sharing, including copayment and coinsurance, is often used to contain medical expenditure by decreasing unnecessary or excessive use of healthcare resources. Previous studies in Japan have reported the effects of a coinsurance rate reduction for healthcare from 30 to 10% on the...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a suffciently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. We present a life-cycle model that...