The paper surveys the economics literature on equity in health care financing and delivery. The focus is, for the most part, on empirical work, especially that involving international and temporal comparisons. There is, however, some discussion of the concept and definition of equity. The...

Egalitarian concepts of fairness in health care payments (requiring that payments be linked to ability to pay) are compared with minimum standards approaches (requiring that payments not exceed a prescribed share of prepayment income or not drive households into poverty). The arguments and...

Up to now catastrophic and impoverishing payments have been seen as two alternative approaches to measuring financial protection in health. Building on the previous literature, the authors propose a unified methodology in which impoverishing and catastrophic payments are mutually exclusive...

Health systems are not just about improving health: good ones also ensure that people are protected from the financial consequences of receiving medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems often perform badly in this respect, apparently with devastating consequences for households,...

The post-communist transition to social health insurance in many of the Central and Eastern European and Central Asian countries provides a unique opportunity to try to answer some of the unresolved issues in the debate over the relative merits of social health insurance and tax-financed health...