BMJ : British medical journal
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To evaluate the effects of a government insurance program covering tertiary care for people below the poverty line in Karnataka, India, on out-of-pocket expenditures, hospital use, and mortality. ⋯ Insuring poor households for efficacious but costly and underused health services significantly improves population health in India.
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To investigate the effect of withdrawing incentives on recorded quality of care, in the context of the UK Quality and Outcomes Framework pay for performance scheme. ⋯ Following the removal of incentives, levels of performance across a range of clinical activities generally remained stable. This indicates that health benefits from incentive schemes can potentially be increased by periodically replacing existing indicators with new indicators relating to alternative aspects of care. However, all aspects of care investigated remained indirectly or partly incentivised in other indicators, and further work is needed to assess the generalisability of the findings when incentives are fully withdrawn.