Question

What are some similarities in challenges that the various countries face with their health systems? What are some differences?

Answer 1

What are some similarities in challenges that the various countries face with their health systems? What are some differences?

Answers :

• Some underlying difficulties in health care systems are common to all, or nearly all for all OECD countries. ie.,Organisation Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) .
• · Equality in health status has not been achieved even where there has been universal access to reasonable standards of health care for many decades.
• · In most countries, however, a minority of the population, usually composed of a dwindling number of people, has not kept up with the general advances in health status.
• · The growing evidence of the persistence of health inequalities, notwithstanding universal access to adequate medical care, has been one of the reasons for a revival of interest in public or population health measures.
• · Another reason has been the growth of evidence about the importance of, for example, educational, lifestyle and environmental factors in the etiology of disease.
• · In response, many countries are developing preventive and population health strategies to tackle the root causes of the remaining disease burden.
• · Patients using publicly funded health care systems have incentives to demand more medical care and expenditure than would have been the case had they remained uninsured.
• · There is ‘moral hazard’ when health services are free of charge or heavily subsidized at the point of use.
• · Moreover, if providers are paid on a fee-for-service basis there is no incentive for them to economize if a third party is responsible for payment.
• · Patients and providers may, in effect, collude in expanding the volume and price of medical care.
• · Although many transfers of health expenditure are reciprocated over the life spans of individuals, at any one time those paying the bills tend to be relatively wealthy and healthy, while those using the services tend to be relatively sick and poor. This creates a potential for political conflict, especially when health expenditure is tending to rise, unless feelings of social solidarity are strong.
• · There remain widespread perceptions of inefficiency in health care delivery in most, if not all, OECD health care systems. For example, there is much evidence of large and, on the basis of what is known about morbidity, inexplicable variations in the rates of utilization of medical care between small geographical areas in particular countries. The usual explanation is that in the absence of objective measures of need and without agreed protocols for care, clinicians in different areas develop their own habits relating to treatment rates on the basis of subjective impressions of need and convictions about clinically appropriate treatments.
• · Health care reforms have often disappointed their instigators. Attempts to change incentives have sometimes had perverse side-effects.
• · Countries with a high public share of health spending have sometimes trimmed it by shifting some financing to the private sector. Countries with low public health insurance coverage have been increasing the public share of their health expenditure. Public insurers have been looking for ways to contract out some of their services to private providers. Meanwhile, some private insurers have been adopting cost containment devices formerly found only in public systems.

What are some differences?

Following are the factors will have some differences with the countries they are:

(1) coverage, (2) funding, (3) costs, (4) providers, (5) integration, (6) markets, (7) analysis, (8) supply, (9) satisfaction, and (10) leadership.