Investing in Young Children

Investing in Young Children

Author: Sophie Naudeau

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2012-07-03

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0821385267

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La Banque mondiale a rédigé ce guide du développement de la petite enfance (DPE) pour répondre à la demande croissante de conseil et d’appui des responsables de programmes en matière de dialogue politique sur le thème du DPE, et pour aider les clients à prendre et à mettre en oeuvre des décisions pertinentes sur la meilleure manière d’investir dans le DPE dans le cadre de leur économie et de leurs priorités nationales. Ce guide comble un manque dans la littérature actuelle sur le sujet (1) en distillant l’information existante sous la forme de notes concises et faciles à utiliser ;(2) en fournissant une information pratique sur les dernières questions pertinentes relatives au DPE, telles que la mesure des résultats du développement des enfants grâce à l’identification et l’adaptation d’instruments efficaces, aux transferts monétaires conditionnels destinés aux familles de jeunes enfants, et autres ; et (3) en évaluant la qualité des derniers faits rapportés pour chaque sujet et en identifiant les lacunes en matière de connaissances pour lesquelles des expérimentations et évaluations complémentaires sont nécessaires.


Moving Toward Universal Coverage of Social Health Insurance in Vietnam

Moving Toward Universal Coverage of Social Health Insurance in Vietnam

Author: Aparnaa Somanathan

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2014-07-07

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1464802610

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Over the past two decades Vietnam has made enormous progress to expand health insurance coverage to its population. Further progress will require significant additional public financing, as well as efforts improve efficiency and strengthen insurance organization and management. It contains recommendations and next steps for Vietnam to follow.


The Impact of Health Insurance in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

The Impact of Health Insurance in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Author: Maria-Luisa Escobar

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0815705611

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Over the past twenty years, many low- and middle-income countries have experimented with health insurance options. While their plans have varied widely in scale and ambition, their goals are the same: to make health services more affordable through the use of public subsidies while also moving care providers partially or fully into competitive markets. Colombia embarked in 1993 on a fifteen-year effort to cover its entire population with insurance, in combination with greater freedom to choose among providers. A decade later Mexico followed suit with a program tailored to its federal system. Several African nations have introduced new programs in the past decade, and many are testing options for reform. For the past twenty years, Eastern Europe has been shifting from government-run care to insurance-based competitive systems, and both China and India have experimental programs to expand coverage. These nations are betting that insurance-based health care financing can increase the accessibility of services, increase providers' productivity, and change the population's health care use patterns, mirroring the development of health systems in most OECD countries. Until now, however, we have known little about the actual effects of these dramatic policy changes. Understanding the impact of health insurance–based care is key to the public policy debate of whether to extend insurance to low-income populations—and if so, how to do it—or to serve them through other means. Using recent household data, this book presents evidence of the impact of insurance programs in China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ghana, Indonesia, Namibia, and Peru. The contributors also discuss potential design improvements that could increase impact. They provide innovative insights on improving the evaluation of health insurance reforms and on building a robust knowledge base to guide policy as other countries tackle the health insurance challenge.


Health Financing and Delivery in Vietnam

Health Financing and Delivery in Vietnam

Author: Samuel S. Lieberman

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0821377833

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Vietnam's successes in the health sector are legendary. Its rates of infant and under-five mortality are comparable to those of countries with substantially higher per capita incomes. However, challenges remain in how to further expand coverage, increase quality of care, and contain the rapidly increasing health care costs.


Health Insurance for the Poor

Health Insurance for the Poor

Author: Adam Wagstaff

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 33

ISBN-13:

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Vietnam's Health Care Fund for the Poor (HCFP) uses government revenues to finance health care for the poor, ethnic minorities living in selected mountainous provinces designated as difficult, and all households living in communes officially designated as highly disadvantaged. The program, which started in 2003, did not as of 2004 include all these groups, but those who were included (about 15 percent of the population) were disproportionately poor. Estimates of the program's impact-obtained using single differences and propensity score matching on a trimmed sample-suggest that HCFP has substantially increased service utilization, especially in-patient care, and has reduced the risk of catastrophic spending. It has not, however, reduced average out-of-pocket spending, and appears to have had negligible impacts on utilization among the poorest decile.


Children of Immigrants

Children of Immigrants

Author: National Research Council

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 1999-11-12

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 0309065453

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Immigrant children and youth are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and so their prospects bear heavily on the well-being of the country. Children of Immigrants represents some of the very best and most extensive research efforts to date on the circumstances, health, and development of children in immigrant families and the delivery of health and social services to these children and their families. This book presents new, detailed analyses of more than a dozen existing datasets that constitute a large share of the national system for monitoring the health and well-being of the U.S. population. Prior to these new analyses, few of these datasets had been used to assess the circumstances of children in immigrant families. The analyses enormously expand the available knowledge about the physical and mental health status and risk behaviors, educational experiences and outcomes, and socioeconomic and demographic circumstances of first- and second-generation immigrant children, compared with children with U.S.-born parents.


Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme

Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme

Author: Huihui Wang

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2017-08-14

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13: 1464811180

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Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) was established in 2003 as a major vehicle to achieve the country’s commitment of Universal Health Coverage. The government has earmarked value-added tax to finance NHIS in addition to deduction from Social Security Trust (SSNIT) and premium payment. However, the scheme has been running under deficit since 2009 due to expansion of coverage, increase in service use, and surge in expenditure. Consequently, Ghana National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) had to reduce investment fund, borrow loans and delay claims reimbursement to providers in order to fill the gap. This study aimed to provide policy recommendations on how to improve efficiency and financial sustainability of NHIS based on health sector expenditure and NHIS claims expenditure review. The analysis started with an overall health sector expenditure review, zoomed into NHIS claims expenditure in Volta region as a miniature for the scheme, and followed by identifictation of factors affecting level and efficiency of expenditure. This study is the first attempt to undertake systematic in-depth analysis of NHIS claims expenditure. Based on the study findings, it is recommended that NHIS establish a stronger expenditure control system in place for long-term sustainability. The majority of NHIS claims expenditure is for outpatient consultations, district hospitals and above, certain member groups (e.g., informal group, members with more than five visits in a year). These distribution patterns are closely related to NHIS design features that encourages expenditure surge. For example, year-round open registration boosted adverse selection during enrollment, essentially fee-for-service provider mechanisms incentivized oversupply but not better quality and cost-effectiveness, and zero patient cost-sharing by patients reduced prudence in seeking care and caused overuse. Moreover, NHIA is not equipped to control expenditure or monitor effect of cost-containment policies. The claims processing system is mostly manual and does not collect information on service delivery and results. No mechanisms exist to monitor and correct providers’ abonormal behaviors, as well as engage NHIS members for and engaging members for information verification, case management and prevention.


From Few to Many

From Few to Many

Author: Amanda Glassman

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780815724797

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"From Few to Many is the first comprehensive look at Colombia's 1993 health system reforms. It describes the implementation of universal health insurance, including a subsidized system for the poor, and examines the impact of this and other reforms during a time when Colombia experienced crushing recession and internal conflict that displaced half a million people." "Prior to the reforms, a quarter of the Colombian population had health insurance. Subsidies failed to reach the poor, who were vulnerable to catastrophic financial consequences of illness. Yet by 2008, 85 percent of the population benefited from health insurance." "From Few to Many describes the challenges and benefits of implementing social health reforms in a developing country, exploring health care financing, institutional reform, the effects of political will on health care, and more. The reforms have provided important lessons not only for continued reform in Colombia, but also for other nations facing similar challenges." --Book Jacket.


Health Insurance Impacts on Health and Nonmedical Consumption in a Developing Country

Health Insurance Impacts on Health and Nonmedical Consumption in a Developing Country

Author: Adam Wagstaff

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 27

ISBN-13:

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The authors examine the effects of the introduction of Vietnam's health insurance (VHI) program on health outcomes, health care utilization, and non-medical household consumption. The use of panel data collected before and after the insurance program's introduction allows them to eliminate any confounding effects due to selection on time-invariant un-observables, and their coupling of propensity score matching with a double-difference estimator allows them to reduce the risk of biases due to inappropriate specification of the outcome regression model. The authors' results suggest that Vietnam's health insurance program impacted favorably on height-for-age and weight-for-age of young school children, and on body mass index among adults. Their results suggest that among young children, VHI increases use of primary care facilities and leads to a substitution away from the use of pharmacists as a source of advice and non-prescribed medicines toward the use of them as a supplier of medicines prescribed by a health professional. Among older children and adults, VHI results in a marked increase in the use of hospital inpatient and outpatient departments. The results also suggest that VHI causes a reduction in annual out-of-pocket expenditures on health and an increase in non-medical household consumption, including food consumption, but mostly nonfood consumption. The authors' estimate of the VHI-induced reduction in out-of-pocket health spending is considerably smaller than their estimate.


Extending Health Insurance to the Rural Population

Extending Health Insurance to the Rural Population

Author:

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 40

ISBN-13:

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Abstract: In 2003, after over 20 years of minimal health insurance coverage in rural areas, China launched a heavily subsidized voluntary health insurance program for rural residents. The authors use program and household survey data, as well as health facility census data, to analyze factors affecting enrollment into the program and to estimate its impact on households and health facilities. They obtain estimates by combining differences-in-differences with matching methods. The authors find some evidence of lower enrollment rates among poor households, holding other factors constant, and higher enrollment rates among households with chronically sick members. The household and facility data point to the scheme significantly increasing both outpatient and inpatient utilization (by 20-30 percent), but they find no impact on utilization in the poorest decile. For the sample as a whole, the authors find no statistically significant effects on average out-of-pocket spending, but they do find some-albeit weak-evidence of increased catastrophic health spending. For the poorest decile, by contrast, they find that the scheme increased average out-of-pocket spending but reduced the incidence of catastrophic health spending. They find evidence that the program has increased ownership of expensive equipment among central township health centers but had no impact on cost per case.