The objective of the study was 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.

Implementing patient cost sharing in the form of copayments, coinsurance, and deductibles is one of the more reliable methods for reducing health care costs. But imposing cost sharing reduces patients' demand for medical care, which sets the interests of insurers at odds with the interests of health care providers and drug and device manufacturers, who generally benefit when patients use more services. (Perspective)

Despite large gains in health over the past few decades, the distribution of health risks worldwide remains extremely and unacceptably uneven says the Lancet–University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health.

India’s sheer size and poverty have meant that addressing the needs of its hundreds of millions of poor and vulnerable citizens has preoccupied Indian policymakers since independence. Unsurprisingly, the mix of strategies, the resulting policy instruments to undergird them and their relative effectiveness have been a matter of contentious debate.