Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is gaining in importance across the world. WHO defines UHC as ‘‘ensuring that all people can use the promotive, preventive, curative, rehabilitative and palliative health services they need, of sufficient quality to be effective, while also ensuring that the use of these services does not expose the user to financial hardship’’ [1]. While many countries have achi...

Correspondence to Professor Gorik Ooms; [email protected] INTRODUCTION A kind of courtship is going on between proponents of universal health coverage (UHC) and proponents of global health security (GHS). In our opinion, efforts to make progress on the path to UHC and efforts to improve GHS can be synergistic, but are not self-evidently so. Making this partnership work will require careful...

Citation: Acharya M (2015) Universal health coverage as a distinct sustainable development goals target: dispelling doubts and underlining implications. United Nations General Assembly is preparing proposal for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and it has recently made explicit its working group proposal. Health-related SDG (SDG3) focus on health, envisioning healthy lives for people at all...

When is a country financially ready to implement universal health coverage (UHC), a health policy designed to ensure that all citizens receive the health services they need without financial hardship? Since no standard set of essential health services or a defined benefits package for universal coverage exists, determining financial readiness is challenging. Health priorities must be set knowin...

Can the right to health, and particularly the core obligations of states specified under this right, assist in formulating and implementing universal health coverage (UHC), now included in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals? In this paper, we examine how core obligations under the right to health could lead to a version of UHC that is likely to advance equity and rights. We first addre...

Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) involves distributing resources, especially human resources for health (HRH), to match population needs. This paper explores the policy lessons on HRH from four countries that have achieved sustained improvements in UHC: Brazil, Ghana, Mexico and Thailand. Its purpose is to inform global policy and financial commitments on HRH in support of UHC. The pap...

Background: Universal health coverage (UHC) aims to provide access to basic health services with no financial constraints. In Iran, the major challenges to the implementation of the UHC plan include aggregation and augmentation of resources, something which could threaten the dimension of population coverage and health service delivery. Therefore, this study reviews the strengths and weaknesses...

Universal health coverage (UHC) is the big objective in health policy which several countries are seeking to achieve. Egypt is no different and its endeavors to attain UHC have been going on since the 1960s. This article discusses the status of UHC in Egypt using theories of political science and economics by analyzing the historical transformations in the Egyptian health system and its institu...

Before 2002, 30% of the entire Thai population of 63 million people remained uninsured. With the advent of the Universal Coverage Scheme (UCS) that combined a medical welfare lowincome card scheme and a government-subsidized voluntary health card scheme with a coverage extension to the remaining uninsured, Thailand achieved the status of universal health coverage (UHC) in 2002 in terms of insur...

To achieve universal health coverage (UHC), a range of health-financing reforms, including removal of user fees and the expansion of social health insurance, have been implemented in many countries. While the focus of much research and discussion on UHC has been on the impact of health-financing reforms on population coverage, health-service utilization and out-of-pocket payments, the implicati...