[EQ] Accounting For Health Spending In Developing Countries

Accounting For Health Spending In Developing Countries

 

Dorota Raciborska, consultant, Social Protection and Health Division, with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C.
Patricia Hernández,health economist, National Health Accounts, at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
Amanda Glassman, fellow and deputy director of the Global Health Financing Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Health Affairs, September/October 2008 Volume  27, No. 5 (2008): 1371-1380

doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.27.5.1371

 

Website: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/5/1371

 

“….Data on health system financing and spending, together with information on the disease prevalence and cost-effectiveness of interventions, constitute essential input into health policy. It is particularly critical in developing countries, where resources are scarce and the marginal dollar has a major impact. Yet regular monitoring of health spending tends to be absent from those countries, and the results of international efforts to stimulate estimation activities have been mixed.

 

This paper offers a history of health spending measurement, describes alternative sources of data, and recommends improving international collaboration and advocacy with the private sector for the way forward….”

 

“…The aim of health-sector accounting is to systematize health spending information for policy uses. The practice and the term arose from National Accounting (NA), hence National Health Accounts (NHA). In time, the methodology was modified to address sector-specific needs, and today the term "NHA" is often used to refer to health spending studies that are the most similar to one of the accounts within the system of NA: the Use of Income Account, which classifies spending by purpose or function. Hereafter, our term of choice is health accounting (HA). HA retains the original goal of NA: to organize and classify all transactions in health-related goods and services according to precisely defined and mutually exclusive categories, for budgeting and evaluation.

 

The introduction of new financing schemes and scaled-up aid to health systems over the past decade has reinforced the demand for accountability….”

 

 

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