Innovative Financing for Health: Financial Options for 2013

| March 5, 2013

What is innovative financing?

Health

Health (Photo credit: Tax Credits)

As the Wikipedia defines it, Innovative financing refers to an assortment of non-traditional devices utilized to hoist supplementary funds for expansion aid through ground-breaking and pioneering projects such as small amounts of contributions, public as well as private partnerships, taxes, and market-based monetary transactions.

Since the commencement of year 2010, most of the innovative finance means were allocated to the health care sector in emergent countries. This machinery has hoisted $2 billion in the past 3 years and helped ininstituting functioning health systems in 49 poorest countries and saved the lives of four million children and 780 000 adults a year.

International facility for the purchase of drugs against contagious diseases like HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis is held up by the airlines consistency tax or a tax levied on airline tickets. As in the year 2009, 30 countries have levied such a domestic tax on airline tickets. This is one of the ways airlines travelers have contributed to the cost of basic drugs for people who cannot afford them.

This levy is one of various novel methods that have raised money for health interventions in developing countries that have been accepted and applied in many countries around the world. Other method includes borrowing money from bond markets to subsidize the cost of childhood vaccines in 72 of the world’s poorest countries.

World Health Organization and UNICEF are in the process of drafting some 92 mechanisms that could be used to fund research into diseases that mostly affect developing countries and also for innovative funding for non-communicable diseases.

A firm and stable financial basis is essential to improve the sustainability and quality of health care. A good health system cannot be funded solely by patients alone; tax and health insurance systems are needed to work in tandem for its sustainability.

  • Performance-Based Financing: Based on the performance, local health workers can get an additional payment from user fees.
  • User Fees: When people pay for a health service, they feel involved in the system. Thus establishing Community Health Committees whose members have a say in what should be done with the payments goes a long way the maintenance.
  • Community Health Committees: Provides a base where health providers and patients can directly interact and where the importance of high quality health care can be reviewed from time to time.
  • Health Equity Funds: Will make certain that even the poorest people have admittance to health care services. When poor families face unforeseen medical emergencies they are further pushed into the chasm of scarcity and liabilities. Health Equity Funds serve as their redeemer by paying the user fees for this group.

Half of all the help, till date, was all ears on contagious diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and less than one fifth was allocated to indispensable healthcare services, road as well as rail network and nourishment. Motherly health, which is dependent on health insurance systems for skilled birth attendants and different procedures to administer any kind of emergency, has undergo a bad experience which should alter in the progressive years with appropriate and ground-breaking financing in the heath care sector.

 

 

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