About this Research Topic
The scale and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is globally evident, and presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, as well as a devastating social and economic disruption, as reported by the World Health Organization. However, a major variation in the responses and performance of national healthcare systems to the pandemic is apparent, and provides a strong motive to thoroughly uncover the roots of this variation.
The financing model has always been a distinguishing feature of any healthcare system. Despite the strong criticism of out-of-pocket payment model common in Low-to-Middle Income Countries (LMICs) (Jakovljevic, M., Potapchik, E. et al 2017), the performance of other models of healthcare systems in managing the pandemic was not superior. Surprisingly, recent attempts to examine the technical efficiency of healthcare systems suggest that a number of LMICs are outperforming those in developed economies (Breitenbach et al. 2021).
The current pandemic represents a unique opportunity to explore whether the variation in the performance of healthcare systems to the pandemic is due to the healthcare financing model, or whether other factors have a greater influence the performance of healthcare systems. Such understanding is important to obtain lessons to rethink the suitability of healthcare systems.
The goal of this Research Topic is to explore the impact of financing on the readiness of different health care systems to respond to emergencies.
In addition to a variety of health-economic evaluations and health policy analysis, methodological and resource use studies are within the Topic scope. Health policy considerations should be primarily focused on financing mechanisms and healthcare system response although other surrounding issues such as health insurance, and the efficiency of healthcare systems will also be considered. High quality innovative contributions from all relevant stakeholders in the field, besides academia, industry and regulatory authorities are also encouraged.
Keywords: Healthcare financing, Healthcare system performance, Covid-19, out-of-pocket model, efficiency
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
