The transition from a centrally planned economy in the 1980s and the implementation of a series of neoliberal health policy reform measures in 1989 affected the delivery and financing of Vietnam's health care services. More specifically, legalization of private medical practice, liberalization of the pharmaceutical industry, and introduction of user charges at public health facilities have effectively transformed Vietnam's near universal, publicly funded and provided health services into a highly unregulated private-public mix system, with serious consequences for Vietnam's health system. Using Vietnam's most recent household survey data and published facility-based data, this article examines some of the problems faced by Vietnam's health sector, with particular reference to efficiency, access, and equity. The data reveal four important findings: self-treatment is the dominant mode of treatment for both the poor and nonpoor; there is little or no regulation to protect patients from financial abuse by private medical providers, pharmacies, and drug vendors; in the face of a dwindling share of the state health budget in public hospital revenues and low salaries, hospitals increasingly rely on user charges and insurance premiums to finance services, including generous staff bonuses; and health care costs, especially hospital costs, are substantial for many low- and middle-income households.
User charges have come to play a significant role in the financing and delivery of publicly provided health services in many developing countries. As a response to health care financing crises, user charges are often promoted as a way of rationalizing the use of care, raising revenue, and improving the coverage and quality of services. The primary purpose of this paper is to provide a critical review of the main arguments for the efficiency- and equity-enhancing potential of user charges. The extent and scope of welfare gains from user charges are found to be very limited in practice. Using a less restrictive theoretical choice model and estimation technique, the most recent demand studies' findings indicate that household's utilization of health services are more responsive to changes in price and income than was initially reported by the early demand studies. Response to price changes are also found to be greater among the poor than the rich. These findings, combined with modest retained fee revenues and the failure of exemption mechanisms to protect the poor tend to cast doubt on the net benefits of user charges policy, particularly in the area of equity. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The introduction of a comprehensive system of user charges in 1995 provided public health facilities in Vietnam, especially hospitals, with a growing source of revenue. By 1998 revenues from user charges accounted for 30% of public hospital revenues. Increasingly, provider incomes have relied on fee revenues and provision-based bonuses, the effect of which is that a poorly regulated fee-for-service system has replaced a salary system based upon a centrally determined global budget. This paper examines the potential influence of providers' on the use of publicly provided health services. Using facility-based data over the period 1996-98, the relative contribution of treatment intensity is compared and contrasted under the two sources of hospital revenues from patients, namely a user charge system and a third party payment system based on fee-for-services. The primary focus of the comparison is on the treatment intensity for all hospital contacts, hospital admissions and the length of hospital stays, decisions normally taken by the providers and over which patients have little or no influence. The results indicate that growth in patient revenues was associated with large increases in intensity. The growth in intensity was more pronounced in the case of inpatient contacts. Moreover, both the admission rate and the length of hospital stay were far higher for better off individuals than for the poor, and greater for the insured than the uninsured. The increase in the intensity of hospital care for both health insurance enrollees and the uninsured can be seen as, among other things, an attempt on the part of providers to increase revenue from health insurance premiums and user charges in the face of a shrinking share of public resources allocated to hospitals, and low wages and salaries.
This paper attempts to examine the impact of state taxation and expenditure activities on Canadian labor and non-labor. Using state expenditure and revenue data for the period 1955-1986, the Canadian transfer ratio is estimated and then it is compared and contrasted with the transfer ratio for the United States. This inter-country comparison also enables us to isolate the influence of a crisis-induced rise in unemployment on the net transfer from arguments that the social wage grew because of the growing power of labor over capital and the state.
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