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Health Financing
Learning from Experience: Health Care Financing in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
This report offers a framework to assess the performance of health care financing systems and improve their equitability, efficiency and sustainability. By reviewing health care financing in low and middle income countries, this report presents possibilities for optimizing the three main functions of health care financing: revenue collection, pooling of funds and purchasing. The report presents a range of country case studies that highlight factors that have contributed to the successful set-up and implementation of these functions.
Health Financing Revisited
This report from the World Bank provides an overview of health financing tools, policies, and trends, with a focus on challenges facing developing countries. Countries operate within highly variable economic, cultural, political, demographic, and epidemiological contexts that affect the development of their health delivery and financing systems. This report highlights some key lessons in this area and provides policy recommendations based on underlying economic principles, political environments, socioeconomic conditions, and institutional realities.
Reaching the Poor with Health, Nutrition, and Population Services
This report from the World Bank presents eleven case studies commissioned by the Reaching the Poor Program, that point to numerous strategies that can help health programs reach the poor much more effectively than at present. The studies look at four countries in Africa, four in Asia and three in Latin America. The studies document how well or how poorly health, nutrition, and population programs have performed in reaching disadvantaged groups. Overall, they demonstrate that health programs can reach the poor far better than they presently do.
Opening Remarks by Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary-General, on Innovative Financing Perspectives
Most developing countries grew at impressive rates during the first five years of this Century, managing to pull millions of people out of poverty. But now their perspectives are bleak: by the end of the year, the number of poor people can increase by more than 100 million. In the last seven years, a range of new financing mechanisms have been launched. The time has come to take stock of this wealth of experiences and to look in more detail at their impact on the global aid architecture and on countries’ strategies, priorities and systems.
Reducing Health Inequalities
In this article, Davidson Gwatkin of the World Bank, draws on a variety of studies and current professional thinking about health inequalities in developing countries and how to reduce them. The article, which makes up a chapter of a book on public health, is divided into four sections. The first provides a brief history of recent trends in concern about health inequalities. The second is a discussion of the concept of health inequalities, while the third summarizes what is known about the dimensions and magnitudes of such inequalities.
Learning from Experience
This report offers a framework to assess the performance of health care financing systems and improve their equitability, efficiency and sustainability. By reviewing health care financing in low and middle income countries, this report presents possibilities for optimizing the three main functions of health care financing: revenue collection, pooling of funds and purchasing. The report presents a range of country case studies that highlight factors that have
Health Financing: Designing and Implementing Pro-Poor Policies
This paper presents a summary of what is known about the effects of various systems of health care financing and how they can be designed and implemented to be pro-poor and focuses on how funds for health are raised. It covers the principal financing mechanisms, the arguments used for and against different financing mechanisms and a summary of empirical evidence from actual implementation. It also looks at designing and implementing pro-poor financing schemes and provides key lessons for effective development and implementation of pro-poor financing policies.
Kampala Declaration
In November 2005, for the Africa region as a whole, the participants of the "Evidence Based Workshop on Fair and Sustainable Health Financing" in Kampala endorsed the "Kampala Declaration". It states that health is a fundamental human right, which must be supported by fair and sustainable health financing systems. It affirms that out of pocket spending should be minimized and prepayments expanded to avoid impoverishment of households and move towards universal coverage.
Editorial: Bridging community-based health insurance and social protection for health care – a step in the direction of universal coverage?
Access to affordable and effective health care is a major problem in low and middle income countries (LMIC) and out-of-pocket expenditure for health care a major cause of impoverishment. One way to facilitate access and overcome catastrophic expenditure is through a health insurance mechanism, whereby risks are shared and financial inputs pooled by way of contributions from salaries or taxation. In LMIC today, the majority of people are either self-employed or work in the informal sector, which makes expansion of formal health insurance, if any, much more difficult.
WHO Health Financing
The World Health Organization website contains a section devoted to health financing. It has two fact pages, links to related topics, statistics, publications and relevant WHO programs and activities.
Visit the WHO Health Financing Section of their website.
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Covering issues affecting the ministries and the people they serve.
Leading Global Health Blog
Even though I have worked in Sierra Leone in the past, the role of MLI Country Lead has given me the opportunity to build upon these previous experiences and to work closely with members of the Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MOHS), to support the implementation of health policies and reforms that they have prioritized.
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