Major gains in global health spending over the last decade are over. This was the top line message from the 2012 edition of Financing Global Health, the fourth report in the series, which Chris Murray and Michael Hanlon of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation recently presented at CGD.
This is a joint post with Heather Lanthorn, a doctoral candidate at Harvard School of Public Health.
In mid-July, amidst the busy global-health month of July, in between the Family Planning summit and the AIDS conference, the near-final draft of the independent evaluation of the Affordable Medicines Facility - Malaria (AMFm) was released.
Two messages reigned supreme at last month’s International AIDS Conference (IAC) in Washington DC: 1) that there should be universal coverage of HIV/AIDS treatment and 2) that international funding for HIV/AIDS has been flat-lining recently and may even shrink. The most optimistic scenario to reach universal coverage will cost $22 billion dollars annually, which means raising an additional $6 billion per year. Clearly, the goal to provide treatment to the 34 million people currently living with AIDS, and the approximately 2.5 million newly infected each year, conflicts with the reality of shrinking aid budgets.
How do we get to universal health coverage? This was the focus of a panel with William Hsiao, David de Ferranti and Yanzhong Huang at the Council for Foreign Relations in Washington yesterday. Of the many salient points discussed, including defining “universal health coverage”, Hsiao emphasized the importance of improving efficiency. He noted that 20-40% of money in health-care is “wasted” due to inefficient processes, as cited in the World Health Report 2010 (see p. 79) and Hsiao’s own research in China. Other studies have found similar results. In the Philippines, Paul Gertler found that providers (i.e. hospitals and doctors) capture rents from social insurance.
This is a joint post with Kate McQueston.
Coming your way in September, Contagion is a star-filled movie about a global bird flu outbreak complete with scary music, frequent deaths, and breakdown of public order… the usual fare.
But dramatic soundtracks aside, there are good scientific and security reasons to fear novel viruses like H5N1 and an uncoordinated, fragmented and ineffectual response. A 2010 study examining the initial response of health care institutions to H1N1 found that over half of hospitals included in the study neglected important infection prevention measures during the crisis. The New England Journal of Medicine cites that one month following the release of the H1N1 vaccine only 7 percent of high-priority adults had been vaccinated. According to the same study, nine months following the pandemic, 39 percent of survey respondents said the government response was fair or poor— with 54 percent of respondents stating that the federal government was doing a poor or very poor job of providing the country with adequate vaccine supplies.
The latest effort to address aid coordination problems and health system issues – the Health System Funding Platform (the Platform) – is evolving slowly and beginning to recreate the same traps it was supposed to solve. In a paper released this month, Bill Savedoff and I show how the natural tendency for aid agencies to fall back on measuring and paying for inputs is likely to undermine the Platform’s goals. Linking funding to results is the most promising way for the donors to achieve the aims they initially set for the initiative.
We know that investing in girls is crucial to achieving our overall health and development goals. So why isn’t more being done?
As we’ve commented upon many times in this blog, the exploding interest in health systems strengthening (HSS) has spread to many global institutions. The IHP+ and the High-Level Task Force on Innovative Financing for Health both aim to strengthen health systems through MDGs 4 and 5.
This is a joint post with Miriam Temin.
When the Lancet published “Global patterns of mortality in young people: a systematic analysis of population health data” by George Patton et al., it brought into the public domain new data to tell an important story: adolescent boys and girls are at risk during this transitional life phase, and those risks have major implications for the health and well-being of this and the next generation.
The article highlights just how much boys’ and girls’ lives diverge with adolescence and how gender fundamentally affects health. Traffic accidents cause 14 percent of deaths among males 10-24 years old deaths but only 5 percent of female deaths; violence causes 12 percent of male deaths but doesn’t even feature in the “top ten” for females. For girls and young women, the major causes of death are maternal factors, at 15 percent.
This is a joint post with Christina Droggitis.
Congratulations are in order for the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC)! Following the White House’s example of sharing news on a daily basis in order to create a more transparent, participatory and collaborative government, PEPFAR has recently launched both a Twitter and Facebook page to more readily inform us about their activities in the countries they support.
This is a great first step in spreading the word on PEPFAR activities, however the main purpose of these pages still remains unclear.