CGD senior fellow Amanda Glassman was quoted in a Financial Times piece on public insurance.
From the article:
The vicious political and constitutional battle over President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform would make it appear that extending government-backed medical insurance is a radical and innovative policy.
But the US approach is in line with a trend in which even some of the most populated and undeveloped countries in the world are experimenting with ways to replace out-of-pocket spending with public insurance.
This trend has huge global implications: raising the prospect of a healthcare safety net for billions of people in middle-income countries, making it easier to tackle public health difficulties, and opening markets for pharmaceutical and healthcare providers.
“There’s a push to expand access to basic healthcare, in many countries, including countries that will make a huge difference ... [such as] China and India,” says Amanda Glassman, director of global health policy at the Center for Global Development, the Washington-based think-tank.
Paying for healthcare out of the pockets of each patient, the traditional model, is good for neither patients’ health or their wallets, experts say. “It can make your spending very volatile, it can impoverish you,” says Ms Glassman. Now, she says, governments are realising “it’s better to pay up front”.
Efforts to introduce or reform national insurance programmes, however, have not been easy for many countries. Most are experimenting with a mix of policies, says Maureen Lewis, former chief economist of the World Bank’s Human Development Network, which looks at policies on education, health and other such matters.