Poverty and user fees for public health care in low-income countries: lessons from Uganda and Cambodia

Poverty and user fees for public health care in low-income countries: lessons from Uganda and Cambodia.

Public health systems in most low-income countries are unfair to poor people. Clearly preventive and curative public health-care services, especially hospital services, are accessed by poor people less frequently than by those who are better off . This injustice is now high on the international agenda. A solution for this issue has some global dimensions, such as the need for a large transfer o...

Achieving Universal Health Coverage by Focusing on Primary Care in Japan: Lessons for Low- and Middle-Income Countries

When the Japanese government adopted Western medicine in the late nineteenth century, it left intact the infrastructure of primary care by giving licenses to the existing practitioners and by initially setting the hurdle for entry into medical school low. Public financing of hospitals was kept minimal so that almost all of their revenue came from patient charges. When social health insurance (S...

User fees or equity funds in low-income countries.

Poverty, user fees and ability to pay for health care for children with suspected dengue in rural Cambodia

User fees were introduced in public health facilities in Cambodia in 1997 in order to inject funds into the health system to enhance the quality of services. Because of inadequate health insurance, a social safety net scheme was introduced to ensure that all people were able to attend the health facilities. However, continuing high rates of hospitalization and mortality from dengue fever among ...

Universal Health Coverage and Primary Healthcare: Lessons From Japan; Comment on “Achieving Universal Health Coverage by Focusing on Primary Care in Japan: Lessons for Low- and Middle-Income Countries”

A recent editorial by Naoki Ikegami has proposed three key lessons from Japan’s experience of achieving virtually universal coverage with primary healthcare services: the need to integrate the existing providers of primary healthcare services into the organised health system; the need to limit government commitments to finance hospital services and the need to empower providers of primary healt...