George Schieber - Böcker

This overview of health financing tools, policies and trends - with a particular focus on challenges facing developing countries - provides the basis for effective policy-making. Analyzing the current global environment, the book discusses health financing goals in the context of both the underlying health, demographic, social, economic, political and demographic analytics as well as the institutional realities faced by developing countries, and assesses policy options in the context of global evidence, the international aid architecture, cross-sectoral interactions, and countries' macroeconomic frameworks and overall development plans.

For humanitarian reasons and the concern for households’ economic and health security, the health sector is at the center of global development policy. Developing countries and the international community are scaling up health systems to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and are improving financial protection by securing long-term support for these gains. Yet money alone cannot buy health gains or prevent impoverishment due to catastrophic medical bills; well structured, results-based financing reforms are needed. Unfortunately, global evidence of “successful” health financing policies that can guide the reform effort is very limited and therefore the policy debate is often driven by ideological, one-size-fits-all solutions.Good Practices in Health Financing: Lessons from Reforms in Low- and Middle-Income Countries attempts to begin to fill the void by systematically assessing health financing reforms in nine low- and middle-income countries that have managed to expand their health financing systems to both improve health status and protect against catastrophic medical expenses. The participating countries are: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Estonia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, and Vietnam. The study seeks to identify common enabling factors of their good performance. While the findings for each country are important, collectively they send a clear message to the global community that more attention is needed to define “good practice” and then to evaluate and disseminate the global evidence base.

Ghana is one of only several African countries to enact legislation and earmark financing for universal health insurance coverage for its entire population. Seven years into its implementation the Ghana National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) has made significant progress in transitioning to universal coverage, but faces significant fiscal and coverage challenges. This study reviews Ghana's health financing system with a special emphasis on its National Health Insurance Scheme. Such an assessment is important because Ghana is often considered a global 'good practice' in terms of earmarking significant amounts of its general revenues for health insurance coverage, providing formal coverage to its vulnerable population groups, and extending coverage by transitioning its existing community health insurance schemes into a national health insurance program. In addition to the global interest in the Ghana 'model', this review is timely in view of recent critiques of the system and questions about its financial sustainability. The study is also unique in terms of evaluating Ghana's NHIS in terms of basic health system goals of health outcomes, financial protection, consumer satisfaction, equity, efficiency, and financial sustainability. The strengths and weaknesses of Ghana's health financing system are assessed on the basis of these performance goals to provide the current health policy reform baseline. The assessment is also based on several new and updated sources of information on: total health spending, inputs, outcomes, household spending, and the macro economy. It also undertakes for the first time an extensive international benchmarking analysis; assesses the financial protection/equity of the system at both macro and micro levels; and, contains an extensive fiscal space analysis based on Ghana's new macroeconomic realities (i.e., the revaluation of Ghana's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) upward by some 60 percent in November 2010, making Ghana a lower middle income country). The study concludes with an assessment of potential structural and operational reform options to assure NHISs long-term efficacy and sustainability in the context of its future available fiscal space.