[Event Information]
World Bank Seminar “On the road to universal health coverage: Lessons from a multi-country study in East Asia”
16 Oct,2014 16:30-18:00
（World Bank Tokyo Office 10F, Fukoku Seimei Bld.)

2014/10/06

Universal health coverage (UHC) isn’t simply about bringing everyone into a health insurance or ‘financial protection’ scheme, and giving everyone legal guarantees to health care. Ultimately it is 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. This seminar will present the results of a study of UHC covering six Asian countries (Cambodia, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam) conducted by researchers from these countries, and from several European universities and the World Bank. The project – known as the ‘Health Equity and Financial Protection in Asia’ or HEFPA project – set out to explore the effectiveness of a number of strategies these countries have used to try to achieve UHC, including both demand-side interventions such as subsidized health insurance, as well as supply-side interventions such as pay-for-performance. The project reached three major and somewhat counterintuitive conclusions: subsidized health insurance is not the panacea many policymakers appear to think it is; health insurance coverage doesn’t always improve financial protection, and when it does, it doesn’t necessarily eliminate financial protection concerns; and tackling health care provider incentives may be just as – if not more – important in the UHC agenda as demand-side initiatives.

Date/Time : Thursday October 16, 2014　　　4:30pm-6pm
Venue : World Bank Tokyo Office 10F, Fukoku Seimei Bld. 2-2-2Uchisaiwai-cho Chiyoda-ku, TokyoMAP
Registration : To attend, please register online (admission is free).
As seating is limited, registration will be on a first come, first served basis.
Speaker
Adam Wagstaff Research Manager, Human Development and Public Service, Development Research Group, World Bank
Adam Wagstaff is Research Manager of the Human Development and Public Services team in the World Bank’s Development Research Group. He holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of York (UK) and before joining the Bank was Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex (UK). He is President-Elect of the International Health Economics Association, was Associate Editor of the Journal of Health Economics for 20 years, and has published extensively in many areas of health economics but especially on equity, financial protection, and health system reform.

Commentator   To be announced