Increased residual disability among poststroke survivors and the repercussions for the lives of informal caregivers.

Purpose: To analyze the associations between increased residual disability among poststroke survivors and the repercussions for their informal caregivers' lives, taking into account the latter's gender and education level.

Methods: 215 stroke survivors (64.5 years; 55.

Patient cost sharing and social inequalities in access to health care in three western European countries.

This study evaluates the association between social class and health services use in France, Germany and Spain, three countries with universal health coverage but with different cost-sharing systems. In France, patients share the cost of both physician visits and hospitalization, in Germany they share the cost of hospitalization, and in Spain there is no system of patient cost sharing. The data were obtained from national health surveys carried out in each of these countries during the last decade of the 20th century.

Patient cost sharing and physician visits by socioeconomic position: findings in three Western European countries.

The association between educational level and the probability of physician visits in three Western European countries, one of which has a system of patient cost sharing was evaluated. Cross-sectional surveys were performed in France, Germany and Spain around 1990 and around 2000. People representative of the French, German and Spanish populations, aged 25-74 years were studied.

[The origins and foundations of social inequalities in health].

France presents the paradox of being the country where the health system has been ranked first in the world for its overall performance and where the inequalities of mortality among men are the highest in Western Europe. This reality is little known, in part because it is little studied. The authors show how the issue of health inequalities has been recently re-discovered by researchers and scientific institutions.