Equity in Health Care Financung, Delivery and Health Status in Asia Pacific Countries

The release of the World Health Report 2000, was WHO's first attempt to evaluate overall health system performance for its 191 member states. Although the concept of systematic evaluation was well-accepted, the WHO method has been severely criticized. The critics mainly focus on the flaws in methodology and the lack of accurate data for most of the nations compared. Consequently, the results have not been well embraced by its member countries. Calls for health care reform ensued, as countries around the world have encountered enormous pressure in health care cost escalation in the 1990's. In the face of health care reforms, equity was one of the major issues to be concerned. Also, although OECD and WHO have endeavored to establish a universal standard to compile national health expenditures (National Health Accounts) for a period of time, most of the Asia-Pacific countries still have not implemented the NHA system. Hence, no data is yet available for international comparison. With a focus on Asia-Pacific countries, the three-year international research project funded by European Commission, Equitap, was conducted with three major goals to achieve: to research on the health data structure, to analyze the system characteristics of the health care systems and to study on the fairness in health care financing systems.

Project ID:PG9112-0047
External Project ID:DOH91-PL-1003