Financial protection for the poor in Colombia: the effects of a subsidized health insurance scheme

Financial protection is one of the objectives of health systems, which protects poor households from falling into poverty as a result of health care related expenses. Expanding prepayment schemes to the poor is difficult in developing countries because labor is largely informal. Providing health care free-at-point-of-service does not adequately target spending on the poorest, but occupation- or community-based schemes have also inherent limitations to achieve universal coverage. Colombia adopted a government-subsidized health insurance scheme (SHI) strategy. The political debate about increasing SHI enrollment needs evidence about the effectiveness of this scheme regarding financial protection. This study runs a four-part model to estimate the effect of SHI on out-of-pocket expenses by the poor that are currently uninsured, if they were enrolled in the SHI. The results show a 43% and 50% reduction in expenses at Bogotá and national level respectively, which confirms the effectiveness of SHI as a financial protection tool.Financial protection, subsidized insurance, out of pocket expenses, Colombia

Effects of the combination of levonorgestrel and quinestrol on reproductive hormone levels and their receptor expression in female Mongolian gerbils (Meriones unguiculatus)

Lv, X., Guo, Y., Shi, D

The almost sure limits of the minimal position and the additive martingale in a branching random walk

Consider a real-valued branching random walk in the boundary case. Using the techniques developed by A\"id\'ekon and Shi [5], we give two integral tests which describe respectively the lower limits for the minimal position and the upper limits for the associated additive martingale.Comment: Revised version for Journal of Theoretical Probabilit

PLURALISM ABOUT TRUTH IN EARLY CHINESE PHILOSOPHY: A REFLECTION ON WANG CHONGS APPROACH

The debate concerning truth in Classical Chinese philosophy has for the most part avoided the possibility that pluralist theories of truth were part of the classical philosophical framework. I argue that the Eastern Han philosopher Wang Chong (c. 25-100 CE) can be profitably read as endorsing a kind of pluralism about truth grounded in the concept of shi 實, or actuality . In my exploration of this view, I explain how it offers a different account of the truth of moral and non-moral statements, while still retaining the univocality of the concept of truth (that is, that the concept amounts to more than the expression of a disjunction of various truth properties), by connecting shi with normative and descriptive facts about how humans appraise statements. In addition to providing insight into pluralist views of truth in early China, the unique pluralist view implicit in Wang\u27 work can help solve problems with contemporary pluralist theories of truth

Dynamic growth estimates of maximum vorticity for 3D incompressible Euler equations and the SQG model

By performing estimates on the integral of the absolute value of vorticity along a local vortex line segment, we establish a relatively sharp dynamic growth estimate of maximum vorticity under some assumptions on the local geometric regularity of the vorticity vector. Our analysis applies to both the 3D incompressible Euler equations and the surface quasi-geostrophic model (SQG). As an application of our vorticity growth estimate, we apply our result to the 3D Euler equation with the two anti-parallel vortex tubes initial data considered by Hou-Li [12]. Under some additional assumption on the vorticity field, which seems to be consistent with the computational results of [12], we show that the maximum vorticity can not grow faster than double exponential in time. Our analysis extends the earlier results by Cordoba-Fefferman [6, 7] and Deng-Hou-Yu [8, 9]