PHM-Exch> New report in the Lancet - sustained international financing needed

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Gorik Ooms <gorik at presr.org>


There's a new report on the website of the Lancet on the MDGs:
http://download.thelancet.com/flatcontentassets/pdfs/S0140673610611968.pdf.

It mentions:

"Thus, proponents of specific interventions - such as vaccination for
children, or completion of tuberculosis treatment to prevent emergence of
costly drug resistance - have good grounds to advocate for protected funding
for a few key programmes. And so we rapidly fall back into the same
discussion of disease-specific programmes in tension with broader
system-wide strengthening of the building blocks of the health system.

To escape this dichotomy, we need to move the debate beyond the financial
sustainability of individual countries' health budgets. Sustainability has
to be linked to global obligation and solidarity that allows rational
planning with the assumption that funding will be predictable,
reliable, and increasing every year."

The importance of redefining 'sustainability' to include both national and
international financing - which means that international financing should
become reliable, no longer intended to be temporary - is thus confirmed
here.

This could be an important argument for the replenishment of the Global
Fund: it is the only funding channel that explictly rejected the aim of
sustainability based on national financing only.

It is also an argument for expanding the mandate of the Global Fund, to
include everything covered by the 'core content' of the right to health.

Last but not least, it is an argument for ending discussions that pit one
global health priority against another. As long as the financing remains
insufficient, there will always be a tension between strengthening health
systems and protecting specific interventions.
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