Comparative research on healthcare financing options shows revenue-financed healthcare to be the most cost-effective, efficient, and equitable, while all health insurance imposes avoidable additional costs.
Finance Healthcare, Not Insurance Premia | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)
Mounting evidence shows that this funding is going to expensive out-of-reach private hospitals and clinics in low- and middle-income countries that are widening healthcare inequalities, exacerbating poverty and gender-based discrimination and violating human rights. Far from advancing progress towards Universal Health Coverage as governments have committed, this form of development finance is undermining it.
An EU directive should mandate member states to address shortages as a risk to occupational health.
Establishing safe staffing in health and social care (socialeurope.eu)
Read the article by Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Nazihah Noor
The World Health Organization recently concluded another World Health Assembly in May. Discussions at the WHA focused on the organization’s role in health emergencies and its financing challenges. Some last-minute changes in the decision on strengthening WHO’s flexible budget raised concerns among civil society about increased corporate influence, which could undermine WHO’s mission of promoting health for all.
In theory, the World Health Organization (WHO) is the coordinating agency for global health. Influential private and public actors have claimed the relevance and central role of this United Nations (UN) agency. In practice, paradoxically, the money budgeted for health goes largely to other institutions and not to the WHO. New institutions and mechanisms have been created to which funds are channeled (GAVI, The Global Fund, Act-A, CEPI, COVAX, etc.). These institutions or mechanisms are, in most cases, public-private partnerships where the pharmaceutical industry is usually present. Official Development Assistance is important but represents only 1 per cent of what developing countries’ expenditure on health. How much is spent to promote global health and where this money goes is the subject of this paper. After the experience with COVID-19, a fundamental question that must be addressed is how the global public interest can be preserved by creating common public goods and protecting human rights in the prevention, preparedness, and response to present and future pandemics.
A research paper from the South Centre:
RP176_WHERE-DOES-GLOBAL-HEALTH-FUNDING-COME-FROM-AND-WHERE-DOES-IT-GO_EN.pdf (southcentre.int)
In a jubilee year for the World Health Organization, we are still far away from achieving Health for All. For the founders of the WHO, health was “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being”, not simply the absence of physical illness. Their vision did not translate into practice, and people are still denied this fundamental human right, simply because they live in a particular region or because they do not have money to pay for care.
Activists around the world have seized the opportunity brought by this World Health Day to mobilize and point to alternative directions to take. Some of these included looking back at existing concepts, like Comprehensive Primary Health Care, which have been cast aside under neoliberal capitalism.
The struggle for health goes on: World Health Day special (peoples-health-dispatch.ghost.io)
The number of cholera outbreaks in the world continues to grow, as does the number of infections and deaths. Cholera is a well known disease of poverty, and its spread can be contained in a very simple way: by ensuring access to clean water and sanitation. Still, there seems to be little interest among countries in the Global North to support the response to the outbreaks, at least while they remain far from their borders.
Read the new report of People’s Health Dispatch
Interesting lessons from the COVID-19 crisis!
Latin America can lead the way on a new public health model | Coronavirus pandemic | Al Jazeera
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