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March 30, 2006
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
