One of the major aims of implementing a national health insurance program in Taiwan in 1995 was to provide financial risk protection to the country's 23 million citizens. Households may differ in how they allocate the resources freed up and available to them as a result of health insurance. This study presented by Jui-fen Rachel Lu aims to evaluate the impact of social insurance on household consumption patterns.

About the Speaker

Jui-fen Rachel Lu, ScD, is a professor in the Department of Health Care Management and dean of the College of Management at Chang Gung University in Taiwan, where she teaches comparative health systems, health economics, and health care financing. Her research focuses on equity issues in Taiwan's health care system; the impact of the National Health Insurance program on the health care market and household consumption patterns; and comparative health systems in the Asia-Pacific region. She earned her BS from National Taiwan University, and her MS and ScD from Harvard University.

Lu has served as a member of various government committees dealing with health care issues in Taiwan, and is the recipient of various awards. She is the author of Health Economics, and has published papers in journals including Health Affairs, Medical Care, and Journal of Health Economics. Her detailed CV can be found online.

Over the last hundred years, the cigarette has become a pillar of consumer life in China and many parts of the world. In 2010, the Chinese tobacco industry produced over two trillion cigarettes, generating over U.S. $90 billion in taxes and profits. Over 300 million Chinese citizens now use cigarettes every day, and tobacco kills 90 times more people each year than HIV/AIDS in China.

How has the cigarette become so integrated into the fabric of everyday life across the People’s Republic of China?

The importance of answering this question is unmistakable, but very little historical research and writing has examined China’s cigarette industry from the mid-20th century to the present. To get to the heart of this question, historians, health policy specialists, sociologists, anthropologists, business scholars, and other experts will meet Mar. 26 and 27 at the new Stanford Center at Peking University for a conference organized by the Asia Health Policy Program. They will examine connections intricately woven over the past 60 years between marketing and cigarette gifting, production and consumer demand, government policy and economic profit, and many other dimensions of China’s cigarette culture.

More than two decades have passed since the first case of HIV infection was detected in Cambodia in 1991. Cambodia is among the countries with the highest HIV prevalence in Asia and has been experiencing the most serious HIV/AIDS epidemic in the region. The epidemic is spread primarily through heterosexual transmission and revolves largely around the sex trade.

Since the beginning of the epidemic, the Royal Government of Cambodia has made a strong political commitment to the need for prevention of HIV transmission and care for people living with HIV/AIDS. It has received some technical and financial support from national and international agencies. Several prevention and intervention programs have been successfully implemented, and the WHO/UNAIDS recognized that the Cambodia’s HIV/AIDS epidemic appeared to have stabilized in 2002.

The estimated HIV prevalence in the general adult population declined to 0.5% in 2009, down from 1.2% in 2001. Among women visiting antenatal care clinics, the prevalence also declined from 2.1% in 1999 to 1.1% in 2006. There was also a gradual increase in the percentage of HIV-infected pregnant women who received antiretroviral therapy to reduce the risk of mother-to-child transmission, from 1.2% in 2003 to 11.2% in 2007, and finally to 32.3% in 2009.

Despite the decline of HIV prevalence in the general population, the prevalence remains high among high-risk groups such as commercial sex workers, men who have sex with men, and injection drug users. Furthermore, the so-called prevention-successful-country is also seeing the growing need for HIV/AIDS treatment and care.

This seminar will highlight the past and current features of Cambodia’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, lessons learned from prevention and care policies, and future challenges that Cambodia may face in the battles against HIV/AIDS.  

Dr. Siyan Yi joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center during the 2011–12 academic year from the National Center of Global Health and Medicine and the University of Tokyo, Japan, where he jointly served as a research fellow and lecturer. He has also served as an adjunct faculty member at Cambodia’s School of Public Health, the National Institute of Public Health, and the School of International Studies at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

Life expectancy at aged 65 is remarkably similar in the three Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei, even though the cities differ in levels of socioeconomic development, health systems, and other factors. Edward Jow-Ching Tu will discuss research that aims to understand this phenomenon. Despite unprecedented increases in life expectancy and attainment of similar current levels of life expectancy, the cities differ in the contributions of changes in major causes of death to the improvements in life expectancy among the elderly. Tu and colleagues have explored several possible determinants of these different patterns and trends in the three cities, including socioeconomic development, health service delivery systems, cause-of-death classification systems, and competing risks from cardiovascular disease and other diseases. Their analysis suggests that the effect of equity of health service delivery has become more important over time.

Edward Jow-Ching Tu is a senior lecturer of demography in the Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work is focused on the impact of fertility, mortality, and migration on socio-economic changes in East Asia countries with special emphasis on nations experiencing a transition from planned economy to market economy; on causes and impacts of mortality changes and health transition on aging societies; and on the causes of lowest-low fertility in many East Asia countries. He has several active research projects ongoing in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He holds graduate degress from West Virginia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). Tu has worked extensively in Asia, and has served as an adjunct professor and taught in many universities in China, including Peking University, Peoples University, Nankai Univerity, and Fudan University. He had served as a senior research scientist at the New York State Health Department and as a research fellow (full professor) at the Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at Academia Sinica. Tu has also taught at the State University of New York in Albany.

The physiological factors underlying links between health and socioeconomic position in the Russian population are important to investigate. This population continues to face political and economic challenges, has experienced poor general health and high mortality for decades, and has exhibited widening health disparities. Dr. Dana A. Glei and colleagues used data from a population-based survey of Moscow residents 55 and older to investigate whether physiological dysregulation mediates the link between socioeconomic status and health. She will discuss the the results of their study, which revealed large educational disparities in health outcomes and physiological dysregulation, especially in men.

Dana A. Glei is a senior research investigator at Georgetown University and has worked on the Social Environment and Biomarkers of Aging Study (Taiwan) since 2001. From 2002 to 2009, she also served as project coordinator for the Human Mortality Database, a collaborative project involving research teams at the University of California, Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Over the past 18 years, she has published articles on a variety of topics related to health, mortality, marriage and the family, and poverty. Her current research focuses on sex differences in health and mortality, the impact of stressors on subsequent health, and how bioindicators mediate the links between psychosocial factors and health outcomes. She has an MA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Princeton University.