How to finance and provide health care for the more than 1.3 billion rural poor and informal sector workers in low- and middle-income countries is one of the greatest challenges facing the international development community. This article presents the main findings from an extensive survey of...

One of the major challenges for health systems is to ensure that everybody has access to needed care without facing catastrophic payments or impoverishment. Argentina is middle income country that has experienced remarkable transformations in income distribution and inequality in the last...

The effect of a social health insurance on health services utilization and on the total potential incidence of catastrophic health expenditure is explored in this paper. Most previous measures of the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure are quite constrained since they do not take into...

This paper summarizes the results of three individual research projects (Asfaw, 2005; Lamiraud et al., 2005; Xu et al., 2005) measuring the impact of membership in a health insurance scheme in three African countries, namely Kenya, Senegal and South Africa. It is structured as follows. The first section...

This paper addresses the issue of the feasibility of 'social' health insurance (SHI) in developing countries. SHI aims at protecting all population groups against financial risks due to illness. There are substantial difficulties in implementation, however, due to lack of debate and consensus...

Several low- and middle-income countries are interested in extending their existing health insurance for specific groups to eventually cover their entire populations. For those countries interested in such an extension, it is important to understand the factors that affect the transition from...