ABSTRACT
This chapter examines trends in population ageing around the world. It finds that Asia leads world regions in the size of its older population. Since the 1980s, governments in Asia have implemented health financing or long-term care insurance (LTCI) reforms to provide the public with better protection against the high costs of critical illnesses and long-term care. This chapter examines how the multiple-streams framework – the problem stream, the policy stream, and the political stream – is revised to examine health financing reforms in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea (ROK) as well as LTCI reforms in Japan and Singapore. It shows that the explanatory power of the multiple-streams framework can be strengthened through enriching the concepts of policy entrepreneurs, ideas, and windows of opportunity in the original framework as well as bringing the theoretical lens of historical institutionalism into the framework.
