The Philippines started its path toward universal health coverage (UHC) in 1969 with the creation of an early Medicare health insurance scheme, where direct payments were made to accredited providers or to patients for reimbursement. After decades of implementation, more than half the population remained without health coverage, prompting the creation of the Philippines Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) in 1995—a parastatal entity tasked with managing delivery of a costed benefits package to all citizens through a mix of premiums, user fees, and government subsidies for the poor. PhilHealth has progressively expanded to cover a greater number of services for larger segments of the population, with Sin Taxes providing an avenue to drive expansion in fiscal space for health.

There are many global resources, including datasets, visualizations, and various forms of analysis that can be used to help make the case for DRM for health. However, policymakers also need to know what policy options have or have not worked, under what conditions, and the key drivers for success. Additionally, a deeper understanding of whether efforts around DRM for health were enduring, consequential, and additional over time- as well as impacts on equity, efficiency, and access- is critical to determining whether they are worth pursuing.

Health financing reform environment in Nigeria. Decades of health system underperformance driven largely by low public expenditure (Table 1) fueled momentum for the 2014 passage of the National Health Act (NHAct)—a legal framework to allocate additional resources for the health sector and define roles and responsibilities of stakeholders involved in achieving universal health coverage (UHC).