A recent study conducted by Pascaline Dupas & Radhika Jain, published in June 2021, reports gender disparities within the Bhamashah Swasthya Bima Yojana (BSBY), a government health insurance program that targets 46 million poor individuals in Rajasthan, India. The...
Disha Bhanot, Assistant Professor at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai writes about how COVID-19 has exposed the dark underbelly of our healthcare system and health insurance schemes may have little chance of achieving sustained benefits. With an...
This budget brief reviews the Malawi national budget 2020/21 and its relation to health. Specifically, the brief analyzes the size and composition of the National Budget, with a special focus on allocations to key social sectors that benefit children. The brief also...
The introduction of the free health care initiative in 2010, which removed user fees for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five was supported by earlier evidence that showed health-related financial costs were a major barrier to mothers and children...
In 2010 the Government of Sierra Leone established the Free Health Care Initiative removing user fees (on drugs and consultations) for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five. The major objective of the scheme, as far as health financing was...
The COVID-19 pandemic poses clear threats to Ethiopia’s reforms and relatively strong economic growth, with “wide-ranging and serious” according to a UN report. The report assesses the devastating social and economic dimensions of the COVID-19 crisis and sets out the...
World Bank’s High-Frequency Phone Surveys on COVID-19, 2020 (HFPS) and the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey, 2018-19 (ESS) are used to assess whether families got help during the pandemic, how quickly they got it, and whether government assistance benefited the...
What has the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic been on poverty in Zambia, and how can social protection programs mitigate these effects? This paper estimates the pre-pandemic poverty level in Zambia and then simulates the distributional impact of COVID-19 in the...
Ensuring adequate access to quality health services, whether preventative or curative, is critical for a country to ensure that its population attain better health outcomes. In this context, universal health coverage (UHC), embedded within sustainable development...
High levels of out-of-pocket spending have been shown to be one of the biggest health reasons people fall into poverty when accessing care, or choose to forgo care. Globally it is estimated that 100 million people are pushed into poverty every year due to exorbitant...
Access to affordable family planning is an essential component of universal health coverage (UHC) as it is one of the most effective interventions that have shown to reduce maternal and under- mortality rates. For Zambia, to include Family Planning (FP) in the...
Part of the WHO Regional Office for Europe, Barcelona Office for Health Systems Financing has published a policy brief titled “Co-payment policy: considerations for Ukraine”, which contains policy recommendations regarding co-payments [1]. In its...
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in India have assumed significant proportions in contributing to the overall disease burden over the past 30 years. In 2017, NCDs accounted for 63.7% of all mortality and was a major contributor to the cost of treatment for inpatient...
Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina has assured that her government will procure COVID-19 vaccines at any cost, and has also allocated financial help for marginalized families. An amount of over 1,500 crore Bangladeshi Takas has been allocated to ease the sufferings of...
Despite having one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, Bangladesh is lagging far behind in providing standard health care services to its over 166 million people, which is deepening their woes amid the coronavirus pandemic. Their budget for the health sector is...
