BACKGROUND Universal health coverage (UHC) is important in terms of improving access to quality health care while protecting households from the risk of catastrophic health spending and impoverishment. However, progress to UHC has been hampered by the measures to increase mandatory prepaid funds especially in low- and middle-income countries where there are large populations in the informal sec...

1 Health and Human Development Division, Pan American Health Organization, Washington, D.C., United States of America. Send correspondence to: Rubén M. Suárez-Berenguela, Pan American Health Organization, Health and Human Development Division, 525 23rd Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037-2895, United States of America; telephone: (202) 974-3482; fax: (202) 974-3675; e-mail: suarezru@ paho.org ...

background performance-based financing (pbf) has been advanced as a solution to contribute to improving the performance of health systems in developing countries. this is the case in benin. this study aims to analyse how two pbf approaches, piloted in benin, behave during implementation and what effects they produce, through investigating how local stakeholders perceive the introduction of pbf,...

background: health inequalitymonitoring especially in health care financing field is very important. hence, this study tends to assess the inequality in household's capacity to pay and out-of-pocket health carepaymentsin tehran metropolis. methods: this cross-sectional study was performed in 2013.thestudy population was selected by stratified cluster sampling, and they constitute the typical ho...

The health sector, a foremost service sector in Nigeria, faces a number of challenges; primarily, the persistent under-funding of the health sector by the Nigerian government as evidence reveals low allocations to the health sector and poor health system performance which are reflected in key health indices of the country.Notwithstanding, there is evidence that the private sector could be a key...

INTRODUCTION National health accounts (NHAs) provide useful information to aid in understanding the health care financing system. This article aims to present a profile of health system financing in Dubai using data from the NHA. We also aim to compare the provider structure of financing schemes in Dubai with those of the State of Qatar and selected Organization for Economic Cooperation and Dev...

BACKGROUND The potentially destructive polarisation between 'vertical' financing (aiming for disease-specific results) and 'horizontal' financing (aiming for improved health systems) of health services in developing countries has found its way to the pages of Foreign Affairs and the Financial Times. The opportunity offered by 'diagonal' financing (aiming for disease-specific results through imp...

A fundamental principle of WHO’s work in health financing is the concept of universal coverage. This requires access for all people to appropriate promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative health care at an affordable cost. This is one requirement of health for all and is consistent with the principle of equity in access. The objective of universal coverage is also associated with equi...

in 2014, a series of reforms, called as the health sector evolution plan (hsep), was launched in the health system of iran in a stepwise process. hsep was mainly based on the fifth 5-year health development national strategies (2011-2016). it included different interventions to: increase population coverage of basic health insurance, increase quality of care in the ministry of health and medica...