Health

Between 2002 and 2016, Georgia’s infant mortality rate fell from 31.1 to 9.5 per thousand live births.  This progress has been realised in part through the Medical Insurance Programme (MIP), introduced by the Government of Georgia in 2006 to provide means tested health insurance for the poor. The MIP is administered by the Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Affairs (MoLHSA), and implemented by the Social Services Agency (SSA). MoLHSA is in charge of policy, financing and monitoring, whereas the SSA makes monthly payments to private insurers. 

Bhutan’s life expectancy has increased from 32.4 years of age in 1960 to 69.5 years of age in 2014. This development can be linked to Bhutan’s Primary Health Care (PHC) system, which provides integrated modern and traditional health care services to all Bhutanese citizens, and dates back to the early 1960s. Bhutan’s National Health Policy is linked to the country’s five year strategic planning framework and is implemented by the Ministry of Health through a network of 31 hospitals, 178 basic health unit clinics and 654 outreach clinics in more remote areas.

With improved access to health care, the under-five child mortality rate in the Philippines decreased by 12 per cent between 2008 and 2012 and by 28 per cent in 2015. In 1997 the Government of the Philippines launched the Philhealth Programme in order to improve the health insurance structure for all Filipinos, including free health insurance for vulnerable groups. The Philhealth Programme was introduced under the Republic Act 7875, signed into law in 1995, which set up the Philippine National Health Corporation (PNHC) to manage implementation of the scheme.

A national social protection floor creates a solid foundation upon which effective mechanisms to reduce poverty and enhance human capital and productivity can be mobilised to promote inclusive, sustainable and resilient development. Upon this foundation, States have moved away from fragmented social protection schemes toward integrated systems that avoid overlap and address gaps in coverage.

The Government of the Republic of Chile launched the Universal Access with Explicit Guarantees (AUGE) health care scheme in 2006 in order to guarantee the right to health care for all citizens. Funding required for AUGE was secured through the 2003 Finance Law that increased the value added tax as well as the taxes on tobacco and customs. In addition, funding for AUGE has also been obtained through the selling of assets that the Ministry of Health had invested in private health institutions.

The 1988 Constitution of Brazil defined a series of guarantees for the right to health and brought major changes to the health care system resulting in the creation of the Unified Health System, or Sistema Único de Saúde, (SUS). The SUS has been designed to ensure that access to health care is universal and free of cost.  The SUS is administered by the Ministry of Health through a decentralised system that includes community participation as a method for effective implementation.

In the Republic of Zambia the mortality rate for children under-five dropped from 190.7 per 1000 live births in 1992 to 64 per 1000 live births in 2015. This reduction in child mortality has been achieved throughout the implementation of Zambia’s Universal Health Insurance scheme, which merged and replaced three compulsory schemes for the formal sector, informal sector and local populations in order to broaden the extent of coverage.

According to the World Bank, between 2011 and 2015, China’s under-five infant mortality rate decreased from 14.5 to 10.7 percent, respectively. This improvement has been realised in part through efforts by the Government of the People’s Republic of China to scale up access to health care with the introduction of several new insurance based schemes between 1998 and 2007. These schemes have been designed to target both urban and rural residents through tailored programming in order to make health care more accessible to all Chinese.

The Republic of Turkey’s national under-five mortality rate was 12.7 per cent in 2015 and has been steadily decreasing for the past decade. This progress has been realised in part through the General Health Insurance scheme (GHI) introduced by the Government of Turkey in 2008 within the legal framework of the Social Security and Universal Health Insurance Law, which was passed in order to provide healthcare coverage to the majority of the population.

In 1989, health care reached approximately 97 per cent of the urban and 79 per cent of the rural population in the Republic of Iraq. However, in 2005 out-of-pocket health expenditure as a percentage of total expenditure on health reached 98.3 per cent. In 2005 the Government of Iraq also adopted a new constitution, which grants the right to health care to all citizens. Since the adoption of the Constitution in 2005, out-of-pocket health expenditure decreased by 80 per cent in 2011 and markig it at 39.73 per cent as of 2015.