We just learned a whole lot more about achieving Universal Health Coverage

Subsidized health insurance is unlikely to lead to Universal Health Coverage (UHC); insurance coverage doesn’t always improve financial protection and when it does, doesn’t necessarily eliminate financial protection concerns; and tackling provider incentives may be just as – if not more – important in the UHC agenda as demand-side initiatives. These are the three big and somewhat counterintuitive conclusions of the Health Equity and Financial Protection in Asia (HEFPA) research project that I jointly coordinated with Eddy van Doorslaer and Owen O’Donnell.

As we all now know, UHC is all about ensuring that everyone – irrespective of their ability to pay – can access the health services they need without suffering undue financial hardship in the process. The HEFPA project set out to explore the effectiveness of a number of UHC strategies in a region of the world that has seen a lot of UHC initiatives: East Asia. The project pooled the skills of researchers from six Asian countries (Cambodia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam), several European universities and the World Bank.