AIM The aim of this study was to ascertain the levels and mechanisms of funding public health in Europe. METHODS A review of published and unpublished documents and expenditure data was undertaken. RESULTS Expenditure on public health in Europe is difficult to determine, but data from national health accounts suggest that it differs greatly across countries, both as a percentage of total he...

This article addresses the potential role of business leadership in diverse efforts to reform health care financing: exploring managers efforts to alter health care markets in their role as large purchasers of health insurance, their potential contributions to future national policy proposals, and their involvement with community-level activities to control local health costs and quality. I arg...

A concrete indicator of a government's commitment to mental health services is the amount of financial resources it allocates. To encourage the government to increase mental health funding, it would require additional research and dissemination findings on the economic consequences of mental health disorders, cost-effectiveness benefits of alternatives treatment, and alternative methods of fina...

We studied the potential of community-based health insurance (CHI) to contribute to the performance of health financing systems. The international empirical evidence is analysed on the basis of the three health financing subfunctions as outlined in the World Health Report 2000: revenue collection, pooling of resources and purchasing of services. The evidence indicates that achievements of CHI i...

How to finance and provide health care for the more than 1.3 billion rural poor and informal sector workers in low- and middle-income countries is one of the greatest challenges facing the international development community. This article presents the main findings from an extensive survey of the literature of community financing arrangements, and selected experiences from the Asia and Africa r...

BACKGROUND The way a health system is financed affects the performance of its other functions of stewardship, input (or resource) creation and services provision, and ultimately, the achievement of health system goals of health improvement (or maintenance), responsiveness to people's non-medical expectations and fair financial contributions. OBJECTIVES To analyse the changes between 1998 and ...