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March
Health Financing Revisited: A Practitioner's Guide
Authors: Pablo Gottret, George Schieber
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Published: March 2006
ISBN: 0-8213-6585-1
Price: $40 Paperback
2006 English Paperback 336pp 6 x 9.25
This overview of health financing tools, policies and trends—with a particular focus on challenges facing developing countries—provides the basis for effective policy-making. Analyzing the current global environment, the book discusses health financing goals in the context of both the underlying health, demographic, social, economic, political and demographic analytics as well as the institutional realities faced by developing countries, and assesses policy options in the context of global evidence, the international aid architecture, cross-sectoral interactions, and countries’ macroeconomic frameworks and overall development plans.
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All health financing systems try to follow three basic principles of public finance:
- Raise enough revenues to provide individuals with basic packages of essential services and financial protection against catastrophic medical expenses caused by illness and injury in an equitable, efficient and financially sustainable manner.
- Manage these revenues to pool health risks equitably and efficiently.
- Ensure the purchase of health services in ways that are allocatively and technically efficient.
Health Financing Revisited: A Practitioner’s Guide addresses the major changes in global health policy, financing modalities, and financing intruments that have occurred over the past 10 years resulting from the global focus on poverty reduction, new global health threats from HIV/AIDS, SARS, and avian influenza, and the international community’s adotption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). As a result of these factors, global health policy has now become a foreign policy, national security, and humanitarian issue for all countries, and significant amounts of increased resources for development assistance, much of it targeted to health, have been forthcoming.
This report assesses health financing policies from the perspectives of these basic principles and evaluates them for their ability to improve health outcomes, provide financial protection, and ensure consumer satisfaction - in a equitable, efficient, and financially sustainable manner. It is intended to equip policy-makers at global and country levels with the tools for navigating this extremely complex domain by providing an overview of health financing policy in developing countries and is a primer on major health financing and fiscal issues. It is intended to assist policy-makers and other stakeholders in the design, implementation, and evaluation of effective health financing reforms.
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Table of Contents:
- Table of Contents, Foreword & Achnowledgements
- Overview
- Chapter 1: Health transitions, disease burdens, and health expenditure patterns
- Chapter 2: Collecting revenue, pooling risk, and purchasing services
- Chapter 3: Risk pooling mechansims
- Chapter 4: External assistance for health
- Chapter 5: Improving health outcomes
- Chapter 6: Increasing the efficiency of government spending
- Chapter 7: Financing health in low-income countries
- Chapter 8: Financing health in middle-income countries
- Chapter 9: Financing health in high-income countries
March
The Elgar Companion To Health Economics
Editor: Andrew M Jones
ISBN: 1 84542 003 9
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
2006 584 pp Hardback 1 84542 003 9 £125.00 (£100 through the web page)
The aim of The Elgar Companion to Health Economics is to take readers to the frontier of research in health economics by providing short and easily readable introductions to key topics. The volume brings together 50 chapters written by more than 90 leading international contributors. The contributions to the Companion are concise and focus on specific concepts, methods and key evidence.
he Companion is a comprehensive and authoritative original reference volume covering theoretical and empirical issues in health economics with a balanced range of material on equity and efficiency in health care systems, health technology assessment and issues of concern for low and middle income countries. It is organised into two broad sections. The first deals with the economics of population health and of health care systems, analysed with both equity and efficiency goals in mind. The second covers the conceptual and practical issues that arise in the evaluation of health care technologies: most often applied to pharmaceuticals but also relevant for other interventions.
Many of the contributions address topical and policy-relevant issues including: the economic causes of the growth of obesity in the West, the link between illicit drug use and crime, the consequences of leaving people uninsured against the costs of health care, the impact of globalisation on the international trade in health care services, the role of informal payments in many health care systems, what ‘equal treatment for equal needs’ means in practice, whether direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals is desirable, and how economic evidence is influencing the way that new technologies are made available to patients. Other chapters stress the research done by health economists to develop theoretical models and empirical methods that illuminate the workings of health care systems.
Contents:
- Introduction Population Health and Health Care Systems
- Part I: Population Health
- Part II: Health Care Finance, Expenditure and Use
- Part III: Equity in Health and Health Care
- Part IV: Organization of Health Care Markets
- Part V: Provider Reimbursement, Incentives and Behaviour
- Part VI: Assessing the Performance of Health Care Organizations Evaluation of Health Care
- Part VII: Measuring Benefits
- Part VIII: Measuring Costs and Statistical Issues
- Part IX: Economic Evaluation and Decision Making Index
Further details are available at: http://www.e-elgar.co.uk/bookentry_main.lasso?id=3572
Contributors: T. Adam, M.C. Auld, P.P. Barros, A. Basu, S. Birch, D. Bishai, H. Bleichrodt, W.D. Bradford, J. Brazier, F. Breyer, A. Briggs, J.F. Burgess Jr, L. Burgess, M. Chalkley, D. Chisholm, K. Claxton, P. Contoyannis, R. Cookson, G. Currie, D. Dawson, P. Deb, P. Dolan, C. Donaldson, B. Dowd, M. Drummond, T.T.-T. Edejer, T. Ensor, S.L. Ettner, D.B. Evans, D. Feeny, R. Feldman, E. Fenwick, A. Gafni, P.-Y. Geoffard, K. Gerard, J. Glazer, D.C. Grabowski, H. Gravelle, P. Grootendorst, T. Iversen, A.M. Jones, D. Kenkel, A.N. Kleit, D. Lakdawalla, M. Lindeboom, J. Louviere, H. Lurås, A. McGuire, T.G. McGuire, W. Manning, X. Martinez-Giralt, H. Mason, D. Meltzer, A. Mills, S. Morris, J. Mullahy, E.C. Norton, J.A. Nyman, O. O’Donnell, T.A. Olmstead, N. Palmer, T.J. Philipson, J.L. Pinto, D. Polsky, C. Propper, M. Raikou, R. Rannan-Eliya, N. Rice, T. Rice, J. Roberts, C.J. Ruhm, M. Ryan, M. Schoenbaum, M.J. Sculpher, P. Shackley, J.L. Sindelar, P.C. Smith, R. Smith, A. Somanathan, A. Street, D.J. Street, M. Sutton, R. Thompson, P.K. Trivedi, A. Tsuchiya, E. van Doorslaer, D.J. Vanness, R. Viney, A. Wagstaff, M.C. Weinstein, D. Wilson, P. Zweifel
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