National Health Accounts: Summaries of Eight National Studies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Special Initiatives Report No. 7

摘要

National Health Accounts (NHA) are a tool for estimating total financial expenditure on health care in a country over a defined period of time. Although the procedure is widely accepted, developed and developing countries share problems in determining NHA estimates: useful definition of terms and classifications of expenditure, reliable data sources, use of the NHA estimates in policy making. In addition, developing countries face new and different issues: lack of detailed information on health expenditures, different composition of expenditures, greater need for resource mobilization, and less attention of cost control concerns. Cross-country collaboration is one way in which individual countries can approach some of these challenges.