Magister Public Health - MPH / Introduction: Health Sector Reform was initiated as a component of the Structural Adjustment Policies that were imposed on the developing countries by the international monetary organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank during the 1980s and the 1990s. It included three main components, that is, financing reforms, decentralization and introducing competition to the health sector. Changes to the Egyptian health system were introduced in the 1980s through the cost recovery projects, while the Health Sector Reform Program was announced in 1997. This culminated in a change from a Primary Health Care model to a Family Health Model as regards the Primary Health Care sector of the Egyptian health system. Changes in the health systems have profound effects on people, so that it is essential to study the ongoing transformation of the Egyptian health system and its implications. Aim: The aim of the current study was to determine the acceptability of the Family Health Model, which replaces Primary Health Care, as currently implemented in Wardan Village, Giza, Egypt. Methodology: The study was a cross sectional survey utilizing a structured questionnaire that was used to determine the awareness and perception/satisfaction of the community members in an Egyptian rural area (Wardan village, Giza Governorate) towards the transformation from primary health care to family health model. 357 subjects participated in this study. Results: Awareness of the study participants towards the transformation process was 15.6%. The overall satisfaction with the family health unit by the participants was 80.5% compared with 35.7% for the old PHC one. Higher satisfaction was associated with older age (p=0.02), less education (p<0.001), being married in the past or present (p=0.02), working status (p=0.007), and more years of using the unit (p<0.001). Acceptability of the family health model among the participants of the current study was high at 88.3%. Higher score of acceptability were associated with less education (p<0.001), being or have been married (p=0.048), and with working status (p=0.005). 93.8% of the participants think that family health unit services are accessible and 79.9% of the participants think that the family health unit provides quality services. Conclusion: The Family Health Model has achieved successes when implemented but encountered some difficulties that have limited the gains and interfered with some of its aspects. The current study has shown that the Family Health Unit has gained a high score of satisfaction and acceptability by the study participants, although the awareness of the study participants about the transformation of the Primary Health Care Model to a Family Health Model was low.

The National Health Insurance Policy Paper (NHI) that was promulgated in 2011, marks the beginning of the South African Department of Health’s journey into delivering a health system that offers universal coverage to all it’s citizens, that is free at the point of contact. (NHI, 2011) The implementation of this new health system faces many challenges such as the impact of HIV/AIDS. This research was conducted to ascertain what this impact would be according to subject matter experts in the field.Twenty interviews with experts from the different stakeholder groups were undertaken.The findings revealed that there is dire a need for a new health system to offer financial risk protection and universal coverage to all South African residents. Health Systems strengthening will form a significant part of the reformation that is needed to get the health system to work efficiently. HIV/AIDS must be monitored and managed carefully to avoid multi-drug resistant strains from emerging. An existing model has been adapted for the purposes of this study that allows focus on the various components of the health system. Each component or building block will need attention and strategic direction to ensure that the entire system can function holistically, seamlessly and efficiently. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

This project defines a concept, “attention to quality,” and proposes that legislative attention to quality is a dependent variable that political science can use to evaluate the content of representation the political system offers, specifically to trace a means by which politics may influence household exposure to financial risk and possibly income inequality. Upstream of regulation or other formal policy solutions, attention to quality is observable consideration of the possibility that a good poses risk, or fails to shield consumers from risk, due to features of its own design. The project studies congressional attention to quality for three privately-vended, middle-class goods with the capacity to impact household risk exposure: health insurance, home loans, and prescription drugs. It also examines attention to quality in risk-modulating pieces of the welfare-state, taking Medicare as an example. The project explicitly contrasts attention to quality with attention to access for each good. Second, based on original datasets, this project reports robust evidence that legislative attention to access exceeds legislative attention to quality for the privately vended goods, particularly insurance and loans. It finds the reverse true of welfare-state goods. In doing so, the project contributes new quantitative evidence to the emergent body of research in American politics on how political processes, as opposed to strictly the macro-economy, may influence household financial insecurity. Third, the project makes progress in uncovering the underpinnings of quality attention. It finds senator attention to quality linked to partisan considerations—particularly the other political party’s degree of dominance in quality talk—in ways that appear to depress quality attention for privately-vended goods but buoy it for welfare-state goods. Quality’s visibility to the public appears to heighten the degree to which legislators consider the other party’s degree of dominance in quality talk when deciding whether to give quality attention. These patterns occur against a backdrop of what appears to be electorally-minded access attention: incumbents attend to the access facet of privately-vended goods as reelection dates approach, while not exhibiting such behavior around the quality facet. These findings have implications for research on congressional agenda setting and representation.

South Africa possesses a highly fragmented health system with wide disparities in health spending and inequitable distribution of both health care professionals and resources. The national health system (NHI) of South Africa consists of a large public sector and small private sectors which are overused and under resourced and a smaller private sector which is underused and over resourced. In broad terms, the NHI promises a health care system in which everyone, regardless of income level, can access decent health services at a cost that is affordable to them and to the country as a whole. The relevance of this study is to contribute to the NHI debate while simultaneously providing insights from other countries which have implemented national health care systems. As such, the South African government can then appropriately implement as well as finance the new NHI system specific to South Africa’s current socio-economic status. The objective of this study was to examine health care financing models in different countries in order to draw lessons for South Africa when implementing the NHI. A case study was conducted by examining ten countries with a national health insurance system, in order to evaluate the health financing models in each country. The following specific objectives are pursued: firstly, to review the current health management system and the policy proposed for NHI; secondly, to examine health financing models in a selected number of countries around the world and lastly to draw lessons to inform the South African NHI policy debate. The main findings were firstly, wealthier nations tend to have a much healthier population; this is the result of these developed countries investing significantly in their public health sectors. Secondly, the governments in developing nations allocate a smaller percentage of their GDP and government expenditure on health care. Lastly, South Africa is classified as an upper middle income developing country; however, the health status of South Africans mirrors that of countries which perform worse than South Africa on health matters. In other words the health care in South Africa is not operating at the standard it should be given the resources South Africa possesses. The cause of this may be attributed to South Africa being stuck in what is referred to as the “middle income trap” amongst other reasons.

The objective of this diploma thesis is to describe public insurance funds of social security and to analyse their indicators and factors which influence these funds most. The social insurance system is significant revenue and expenditure channel of the national budget in the Czech Republic. Social and private insurance are two basic types of insurance. Social solidarity is essential principle of social insurance and principle of equivalence is typical of private insurance. This diploma thesis deals with systems of pension insurance, sickness insurance and health insurance. Existing setting of these systems will probably be inconvenient in the future. That is why they are subject of political discussion nowadays. Unfavourable demographic trend is the most major problem of pension insurance system. Effectiveness of sickness insurance is reduced by abuse of sick benefits. Increasing health care expenditures and excess of demand for health care are difficult questions for solving and setting of health insurance. Changes that are being made in social insurance systems today and also their impact on economy are described in conclusion.

The main goal of diploma thesis is the evaluation of the position of Všeobecná zdravotní pojišťovna in the system of czech health insurance companies by application of multiple criteria decision making methods. Health insurance companies are compared by provided benefits. Analysis is concentrated on three groups : the general public, women and men.

The goal of my final thesis was the analyses of commercial health insurance companies that are based on the Slovak market and also operate there. It was done by the analyses of internal and external environment and its financial coefficients. The paper starts with the introduction which describes the reasons of writting the paper and the methods used. The paper consists of 6 capitols: 4 theoretical and 2 practical. First two capitols briefly describe the insurence system in Slovakia as the part of national economy. Third and fourth capitol talk about commercial health insurence companies and their cooperation with public health insurence companies. The practical part of the paper consists of two capitols: strategic and financial analysis. Based on these facts, there is also graphical demonstration of internal and external environment, and the financiel coefficients of insurence`s development. The conclusion sets the overall results of the analysis as well as the 5 most successful commercial insurence companies are set. The conclusion is also based on the list of 10 criteria for the successful insurence companies, and it also talks about the criteria of clients when choosing their insurence company.

This thesis is concerned with US health care. It is focused especially on the health insurance market. It introduces basic characteristics of the US insurance system and discusses its main problems. The goal of this thesis is to determine whether voluntary private insurance is the main source of problems that the US health care system currently experiences. In order to do that, greatest deficiencies of US insurance policies, especially private ones, are identified based on the efficiency criterion. It is also briefly evaluated if identified deficiencies are going to be affected by the current health care reform.

Expenditures on health are currently an important and growing item of public as well as private budgets in the developed world. This diploma thesis analyzes two different approaches to the function of health insurance on the example of the Czech Republic and the United States of America. The theoretical part will generally characterize access to health care through different theories; there will be also introduced the system of health insurance and the agents on health care market. The specifics of the health care market will be also explained. The analytical part of the work will focus on health insurance systems in the Czech Republic and the United States and their development, with accent on major reforms of recent years. With mutual comparison of the two systems, thesis will examine the shortcomings of public health insurance and private health insurance, including the effectiveness of their removal. Afterwards, the analysis of selected indicators of health care will be provided. The aim of the work is an analysis of the different systems of health insurance in the Czech Republic and the United States with relationship to the recent reforms and evaluation of their mutual effectiveness.

This master thesis deals with business process modelling of records management service and its electronic form in the area of health insurance companies. The beginning of the thesis introduces the reader to the concepts of process modelling and records management including legal requirements and specifics from the perspective of health insurance company. The next section describes the MMABP methodology, which is used for process analysis of records management processes in accordance with statutory requirements. The result is then confronted with a practical case of doing records management in an electronic form from the perspective of a health insurance company.