By Songa wa Songa
Well-off people in Tanzania and other developing countries will be taxed to fund universal health insurance for the poor who pay their hospital bills out-of-pocket, if a proposal by the United Nations launched here yesterday is adopted.
According to ‘Universal Health Coverage: A Commitment to close the gap’, Universal Health Coverage (UHC)—ensuring that all people obtain the health services they need, of good quality without suffering financial hardship when paying for them, is rooted in the human right to health that governments are obliged to fulfill.
“It aims to ensure access to good quality health services based on need, not on the ability to pay or other social attributes,” reads the report in part: “It seeks to reduce the financial hardships caused by reliance on ineffectual health systems, the volatility of markets and having to pay fees at the point of use.”
Authors of the report argue that each year, 150 million people face financial catastrophe and another 100 million are pushed into poverty due to high out-of-pocket Spending (OOPS) on healthcare—which is termed in the report as the most regressive form of health financing.
And as countries design health system reforms in the post-2015 framework, the report stresses that it is critical that the poor and vulnerable benefit first alongside the increase of funding for the health sector. “This will require the elimination of OOPS, at least for vulnerable populations and priority services, with greater reliance on mandatory mechanisms for prepayment from taxation, whereby contributions are made according to ability to pay and disassociated from healthcare needs,” the report recommends.
The report launched at Rockefeller Foundation, is based on a 2012 UN resolution to make UHC a key global health objective and the foundation which began advocating for its endorsement since 2009 has so far invested $100 million in the course.
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