With a focus on ‘Advancing Universal Health Coverage in a Post-Pandemic Era’, the 2024 Asia-Pacific Health Financing Forum brought together policy makers from ministries of health, planning, finance, and social health insurance agencies as well as development partners, to share challenges and lessons learned over the last two years.
Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being is a 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). To achieve this, countries need to accelerate progress towards universal health coverage (UHC), where everyone has access to quality health services without facing financial hardship. However, as highlighted in the recent Tracking Universal Health Coverage: 2023 Global Monitoring Report, the world is not on track to meeting this target: more than half of the world’s population continue to lack coverage for essential health services and two billion experienced financial hardship—as measured by those spending more than 10% of their budget on health, a share deemed ‘catastrophic’—due to high out-of-pocket health spending. A large share of those lacking coverage and facing financial hardship live in the Asia-Pacific region.
During COVID-19, economies contracted, government revenues declined, and public debt levels soared. Service coverage rates stagnated and, in some countries, even declined. Public spending on health rose to combat the initial impact of the virus and, subsequently, the roll-out of vaccines. However, this upswing appears to be reversing. The incidence of financial hardship has been rising even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic despite a decline in the out-of-pocket share of total health spending. Reinvigorating progress towards UHC will be an uphill task: not only for increasing the quantity and quality of service coverage but also to minimize the incidence of catastrophic health spending while at the same time ensuring resilience against future pandemics, adapting to ageing populations and reducing premature morbidity and mortality due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and coping with the significant health-related challenges of climate change. Ongoing reforms will be essential to increase the magnitude and quality of public spending on health, reduce dependence on out-of-pocket spending, and strengthen the primary health care foundation of health systems. The forum provided a platform for countries to learn from each other’s reform agendas as well as from international experts ands think tanks.
The forum was co-hosted by the World Bank and the Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents, and supported by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, through the Advance UHC Trust Fund, and the Government of Japan.