Pooling Reforms to Strengthen Health Financing for Universal Health Coverage

This brief focuses on how pooling arrangements—the way countries combine funding from different sources to spread the financial risk of needing to pay for health services—can be improved to accelerate progress toward UHC. It synthesizes the existing large body of normative guidance and evidence from country experiences in a way that is practical and useful, beginning with pooling as a core function of health financing for UHC; summarizing types of pooling reforms and providing country examples; discussing political considerations that may influence the feasibility or timing of technically sound improvements to pooling; and concluding with implications for countries and deeper insight into the experiences of Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Colombia, and Thailand.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the technical contributions of Joseph Kutzin, Abo Yazbeck, and Jack Langenbrunner.