Beyond Survival: Protecting Households from Health Shocks in Latin
America breaks new ground in the ongoing debate about health finance
and financial protection from the costs of health care. The evidence and
discussion support the need to consider financial protection, in
addition to health status, as a policy objective when setting priorities
for health systems.
This book reviews the Latin American experience with health reform in
the last 20 years and the fundamentals of health system financing, using
new evidence to show the magnitude and mechanisms that determine the
impoverishing effects of health events (diseases, accidents, and those
of the life cycle). It provides options for policy makers on how to
protect, and help households to protect themselves, against this
impoverishment.
The authors use empirical evidence from six case studies commissioned
for this report, on Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Honduras, and
Mexico. This book provides policy makers with a solid conceptual basis
for decisions on the contents of mandatory health insurance benefit
packages, choices of financing mechanisms, and the roles of public
policy in this field.
Beyond Survival provides an in-depth analysis of, and organizational
alternatives for, risk pooling and health insurance for financial
protection. It analyzes the urgent need to extend risk pooling to the
informal sector, the challenges for current social insurance
arrangements, and options for policy makers to effectively extend risk
pooling to the informal sector.
