ABSTRACT
Healthcare in almost all advanced economies is publicly funded and there is a global initiative – known as Universal Health Coverage (UHC) – to move all countries towards this. In this chapter, we seek to explain why it is that governments are involved in healthcare financing. Although there are strong moral and political cases for government intervention in healthcare, we focus on the economic case, which stems from notions of market failure. We then address the issues of how such funding mechanisms are challenged and what might be a potential role for social finance – in the form of healthcare funded through microfinance and impact bonds.
