Private Health Insurance in South Korea: An International Comparison
-
In this event, Dr. Jaeun Shin will discuss the historical and policy background of expanded
private health insurance in South Korea. Looking at the public-private mix of
health care financing and its impacts, Shin
conducted a comparative study of thirty member countries of the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) during the period 1980 to 2007 to ask
whether private health insurance can counterbalance limited government
financing, high out-of-pocket payments, and the persistent financial deficit of
South Korea’s National Health Insurance system.
The panel analyses of OECD
Health Data from 2009 suggest that private health insurance financing is unlikely to
reduce government spending on health care and social security. Also, Shin found little
evidence that out-of-pocket payments will be replaced by private health
insurance payments. Private health insurance payments, however, are found to
have a statistically significant positive association with total spending on
health care, which indicates that the coverage effect of private health
insurance—in addition to national health insurance—may exceed the efficiency
gain through the market competition that private insurers may deliver to the
health care sector. These findings leave it unclear whether private initiatives in health care financing will be as
effective as the policy advocates hope for, in dealing with the challenges of
national health insurance in South Korea. Shin suggests that further studies of how public and
private insurers, and providers and consumers interplay in response to a given structure of private-public mix
in financing are warranted to decide the right balance between private coverage
and publicly provided universal coverage.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Jaeun Shin
Associate Professor of Economics
Speaker
KDI School of Public Policy and Management, South Korea
Seminars
Qiulin Chen
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room C335
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
0
qlchencn@stanford.edu
2011 Shorenstein-Spolgi Fellow in Comparative Health Policy
Qiulin Chen is a postdoctoral fellow of Shorenstein APARC and a member of the center's Asia Health Policy Program. His main interest of research is health economics and public finance, focusing on policy and outcome comparison of health care systems and Chinese health reform. His dissertation focused on performance comparison between public (or governmental) and private health care financing, between local and central government responsibility on health care, between contracted and integrated health care system. In particular, his dissertation examined under Chinese-style decentralization, known as fiscal decentralization with political centralization, how economic competition affect local government's behaviour on health investment, and why public contracted system obstructs health performance and provides one channel of such effects in terms of preventive care and public health. He is currently involved in a comparative research project on demographic change in East Asia based on the National Transfer Accounts data and analysis.
Chen's recent publication is "The changing pattern of China's public services" (with Ling Li and Yu Jiang) in Population Aging and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective (Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason, editors), forthcoming 2011. Before studying in Stanford, he has published more than 10 papers in academic journals in Chinese, such as Jing Ji Yan Jiu (Economic Research) and Zhong Guo Wei Sheng Jing Ji (Chinese Health Economics), and 5 book chapters. He has participated in about 20 research projects, such as A Design of Framework for Healthcare Reform in China which is commissioned by the State Council Working Party on Health Reform, Strategy Planning Study of "Healthy China 2020" which is commissioned by the Minister of Health, and Health Challenge in the Aging Society and It's Policy Implication funded by Chinese National Natural Science Foundation.
Chen earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Peking University in 2010, and earned a B.A. in Business Administration from Nanjing University in 2001. From 2004 through 2008, he was Executive Assistant of the Director of the China Centre for Economic Research at Peking University (CCER). He is also a postdoctoral fellow of National School of Development at Peking University (Its predecessor is CCER).
CV
Document
Qiulin_Chen-CV.pdf
(56.58 KB)
File title
Qiulin_Chen-CV.pdf
Private Health Insurance in South Korea: An International ComparisonPrivate Health Insurance in South Korea: An International Comparison
In this study, we discuss the historical and policy background of expanded private health insurance in South Korea. Looking at the public-private mix of health care financing and its impacts, we conduct a comparative study of 30 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) over the period 1980–2007 to ask whether private health insurance can counterbalance limited government financing, high out-of-pocket payments, and the persistent financial deficit of South Korea’s National Health Insurance system. The panel analyses of OECD Health Data 2009 suggest that private health insurance financing is unlikely to reduce government spending on health care and social security. Also we find little evidence that out-of-pocket payments will be replaced by private health insurance payments. Private health insurance payments, however, are found to have a statistically significant positive association with total spending on health care, which indicates that the coverage effect of private health insurance—in addition to national health insurance—may exceed the efficiency gain through the market competition that private insurers may deliver to the health care sector. These findings leave it unclear whether private initiatives in health care financing will be as effective as the policy advocates hope for, in dealing with the challenges of national health insurance in South Korea. Further studies of how public and private insurers, and providers and consumers interplay in response to a given structure of private-public mix in financing are warranted to decide the right balance between private coverage and publicly provided universal coverage.
Philippines Conference Room
Jaeun Shin
Associate Professor of Economic
Speaker
KDI School of Public Policy and Management
John (Jack) W. Rowe
Columbia University, MSPH
Dept. of Health Policy & Mgmt.
600 West 168th Street, 6th Fl.
New York, NY 10032
0
Professor, Department of Health Policy and Management, Joseph Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Dr. John Rowe is the Julius B. Richmond Professor of Health Policy and Aging at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Previously, from 2000 until his retirement in late 2006, Dr. Rowe served as Chairman and CEO of Aetna, Inc., one of the nation's leading health care and related benefits organizations. Before his tenure at Aetna, from 1998 to 2000, Dr. Rowe served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Mount Sinai NYU Health, one of the nation’s largest academic health care organizations. From 1988 to 1998, prior to the Mount Sinai-NYU Health merger, Dr. Rowe was President of the Mount Sinai Hospital and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Rowe was a Professor of Medicine and the founding Director of the Division on Aging at the Harvard Medical School, as well as Chief of Gerontology at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital. He was Director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Aging and is co-author, with Robert Kahn, Ph.D., of Successful Aging (Pantheon, 1998). Currently, Dr. Rowe leads the MacArthur Foundation’s Network on An Aging Society .
Dr. Rowe was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation and is Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and the Board of Overseers of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He is Chair of the Advisory Council of Stanford University’s Center on Longevity, and was a founding Commissioner of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission ( Medpac) and Chair of the board of Trustees of the University of Connecticut.
Adjunct Affiliate at the Center for Health Policy and the Department of Health Policy
CV
Document
John_(Jack)_Rowe-CV.pdf
(65.37 KB)
File title
John_(Jack)_Rowe-CV.pdf
Hide publication sections
Off
Nathan Eagle on mobile phone usage in the developing world
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs
Nathan Eagle, Founder and CEO of txteagle spoke at the weekly Liberation Technology Seminar Series on Dececember 2, 2010 about mobile phone usage in the developing world.
Although txteagle began in 2007 as a purely academic project, the current goal of the company and of its founder and CEO, Nathan Eagle, is to give one billion people a five percent raise. In his presentation, Eagle described the context for which txteagle was designed, how the company's focus has evolved over the past three years, and what steps the company is taking to move closer to achieving this goal in the future.
Image
Mobile applications developed as a part of MIT's Entrepreneurial Research on Programming and Research on Mobiles (EPROM) project offered some insights into the potential of mobile-based tools. In Rwanda, where electricity is a prepaid service, one of Eagle's former students quickly cornered a significant share of the market by creating scratch cards for crediting one's electricity bill via mobile phone. In Eastern Kenya, a program called SMS Blood Bank was created to enable real time monitoring of blood supplies at local district hospitals in Eastern Kenya. Although SMS reporting of low blood levels resolved the huge amount of latency in the system of local district hospitals (where responses to dips in supply had typically taken up to 4 weeks), the price of reporting blood levels via SMS represented a pay cut for local nurses; despite nurses' initial enthusiasm, SMS reporting tapered off within weeks. When the idea of sending about 10 cents of airtime to compensate nurses for each SMS report of blood level data proved a success, the model behind txteagle was born.
Designed as a means to monetize people's downtime, txteagle has grown rapidly through partnerships with over 220 mobile operators in about 80 countries around the world. In turn for helping these operators analyze their customer data, txteagle has gained access to about 2.1 billion mobile subscribers. Partnering with txteagle is a winning proposition for mobile operators, since the airtime compensation mobile subscribers receive from txteagle improves operators' Average Revenue per User (ARPU), a statistic that had been plummeting as more and more poor people became mobile phone users. By enabling people to carry out work via web browsers or SMS and compensating them via mobile money or airtime, txteagle has become a market leader at efficiently gathering data in the developing world.
Since txteagle was first created, the company has attempted to move from an outsourcing/back-office model to an emphasis on work that leverages a person's unique local knowledge and information. Typically outsourced tasks such as forms processing, audio transcription, inventory management, data cleaning, tagging, and internet search, tend to be less rewarding to the worker. By focusing on local data instead, txteagle enables unprecedented insight into emerging markets, all while optimizing engagement with local customers. Typical tasks include: maps and directions, local market prices and businesses, survey research and polling, and other forms of local knowledge gathering.
One of txteagle's central initiatives, GroundTruth, leverages this local knowledge-based model to carry out better market research. Today, global brands are already spending about $125 billion annually in emerging markets to engage the "next billion," but they typically carry out this research in a sub-optimal way. Through the txteagle platform, Eagle suggests, brands and organizations can use advertising money to design better products and services, conduct market research, and carry out brand engagement. Recent success cases include the use of txteagle to help a program of the United Nations to reach survey respondents directly and to enable the World Bank to obtain better local market price data at lower cost.
Although txteagle's rapid growth and early successes have been encouraging, the company has ambitious goals for the next two years. The company began by focusing on outside sales through its GroundTruth market research program. Next year, the company hopes to generate syndicated data and ultimately to create a self-source platform enabling anyone to conduct their own population-level surveys. By continuing to focus on improving the quality of both their data and workers over time, txteagle aims to have an even greater positive impact on the incomes of the hundreds of millions of mobile phone users at the base of the pyramid.
All News button
1
Mental Health in China after the Sichuan 5.12 Earthquake: An Empirical Study of Knowledge Transfer from Doctor to Patient
-
After the Sichuan 5.12 earthquake, many people in the disaster area suffered from mental health problems. To decrease morbidity from mental disease, the Sichuan authorities worked with diverse hospitals to establish a “three-level network of psychiatric prevention and treatment.” The goal was to disseminate knowledge about prevention and treatment for psychiatric conditions from doctors to recipients, especially regarding symptoms. How to disseminate such knowledge effectively and efficiently deserves study. Based on a sample of 146 doctor-recipient pairs from 52 hospitals in diverse areas of China (including Sichuan, Beijing, and Guangzhou), this study examines the impact of knowledge characteristics, the network status of the doctor, the network status of the hospital with which the doctor is affiliated, and the relationship quality between doctor and recipient on the effectiveness and efficiency of knowledge transfer from the doctor to patient. Findings indicate that high-status doctors are more effective in knowledge transfer. In addition, low-status hospitals were found to have a positive effect on knowledge transfer efficiency. In particular, results highlight the strong positive impact that the quality of the relationship between the doctor and patient has on both the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge transfer. Finally, findings suggest that the relationship between knowledge characteristics and knowledge transfer is partially mediated by the relationship quality between the doctor and the recipient.
Philippines Conference Room
(Amy) Zhe Zhang
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
0
amyzhe@stanford.edu
Visiting Scholar, 2009-2011
Zhe Zhang is an assistant professor of organization management at the School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China, where she also received her PhD. Her research focuses on public-private partnerships, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility. She has published in the Journal of High Technology Management Research, International Journal of Health Care Finance & Economics, Management and Organization Review, and the International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organizations.
Seminars
Health Reform in the Pacific: Comparing Approaches to Universal Coverage in the Philippines and the State of Hawaii
Related Multimedia
Health Reform in the Pacific: Comparing Approaches to Universal Coverage in the Philippines and the State of Hawaii
Related Multimedia
Martin Connor
117 Encina Commons
Stanford, CA 94305
0
drmartinconnor@yahoo.co.uk
Connor_Martin_profile.JPG
Martin Connor is presently a Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice. These fellowships are delivered by the Commonwealth Fund and support mid-career physicians and health service managers and researchers to study in the US. During his time at CHP/PCOR Martin will be studying integrated care and its potential to contribute to the delivery system aspects of Health Reform as well as maintaining long standing interests in policy developments in the UK and developments in physician leadership and accountability.
Prior to starting the fellowship, Martin was Director of the Trafford Integrated Care Organisation Programme in the UK NHS, as the follow on to his role as Deputy Chief Executive at Trafford PCT in Manchester, England.
Before this, he worked from 2005-08 as special policy adviser to the Department of Health in Northern Ireland, leading the development of national policy at Permanent Secretary and ministerial level. He went on to lead the reform programme and established the Service Delivery Unit in Northern Ireland. This transformed waiting times for elective assessment and treatment, increased the involvement of clinical professionals in decision making and the developed a novel, high frequency, patient level information base to support strategic decision making.
Between 2002 - 2005, he was Associate Director (Health Reform) for the Greater Manchester Strategic Health Authority. He co-authored the strategy for GMSHA, which led to the area moving from 'special measures' to 'high performing' within 2 years. This strategy included the first health authority-wide demand management system in the NHS that was commended by the Audit Commission.
In his twenties, he studied classical and linguistic philosophy following the award of a studentship from Durham University where he received his doctorate in 2001. He joined the NHS on the graduate management training programme in 1999.
Adjunct Affiliate at the Center for Health Policy and the Department of Health Policy