Health Systems

This is a joint post with Rachel Silverman. Last week, I attended a conference on South Africa’s national health insurance (NHI), which was hosted in Pretoria by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). A key recurring theme and consensus emerged: South Africa must develop a clearer plan a...

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 Me...

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...

In a recent working paper, Jacob Hughes, Walter Gwenigale and I describe Liberia’s unique experience in pooling donor funds for health in a post-conflict setting, with good results. We also describe a new and complementary agreement between Liberia and USAID, called the Fixed Amount Reimbursement Ag...

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 ...