Universal coverage by health services is one of the core obligations that any legitimate government should fulfil vis-à-vis its citizens. However, universal coverage may not in itself ensure universal access to health care. Among the many challenges to ensuring universal coverage as well as access to health care are structural inequalities by caste, race, ethnicity and gender. Based on a review...

risk of f nancial ruin or impoverishment. T at is the essence of universal health coverage. In 2005, all member states of the World Health Organization (WHO) made a commitment to achieve that goal. T e commitment was reaf rmed in 2012 through a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly (www.un.org/en/ga/67/resolutions.shtml) promoting universal health coverage, including comprehensive p...

In responses to Norheim’s editorial, this commentary offers reflections from Thailand, how the five unacceptable trade-offs were applied to the universal health coverage (UHC) reforms between 1975 and 2002 when the whole 64 million people were covered by one of the three public health insurance systems. This commentary aims to generate global discussions on how best UHC can be gradually achieve...

Universal coverage embodies a critical underlying social value; the recognition that those goods and services that support health, however we define it, have to be available and accessible to all. The choice of which of these goods and services are considered essential, the mechanisms by which they would be financed and so on are almost secondary to this basic consensus, that coverage has to be...

The present Millennium Development Goals are set to expire in 2015 and their next iteration is now being discussed within the international community. With regards to health, the World Health Organization proposes universal health coverage as a 'single overarching health goal' for the next iteration of the Millennium Development Goals.The present Millennium Development Goals have been criticise...

Vietnam has pursued universal health insurance coverage for two decades but has yet to fully achieve this goal. This paper investigates the barriers to achieve universal coverage and examines the validity of facilitating factors to shorten the transitional period in Vietnam. A comparative study of facilitating factors toward universal coverage of Vietnam and Korea reveals significant internal f...