Christmas came early this year for the wonkiest of PEPFAR-watchers. Our gift: the preliminary report on the pilot of PEPFAR’s Expenditure Analysis Initiative, an important and exciting move by PEPFAR towards evidence-based decision making and greater transparency.
In this austere budget climate, generating “value for money” (VFM) is a top concern for global health funding agencies and their donors, who want the biggest bang for their buck in terms of lives saved and diseases controlled. To that end, CGD has convened a working group to help shape the VFM agenda with high impact recommendations for reducing costs, increasing impact per dollar spent, and focusing investments on the highest impact interventions among the most affected populations. Since our first meeting in April, we’ve been hard at work collecting evidence, consulting with global health agencies, and identifying the most promising areas for further investigation. The main funding agency under our VFM microscope: the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
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.
You might have missed in early December the news reported by WHO on the raging measles outbreaks across Europe this year, despite the decline of measles globally. In 2011 France alone had 14,000+ cases of measles this year (see p.