Assignment Help on Healthcare Finance System from The Australian and Nigerian Governments Perspective

Introduction: -

Over the last decades, the understanding of the importance of established appropriate health finance has been increasing at a global level. The health financing system, which mainly concerns organizing fund resources and how they are generated and used in the health system, is one of the most important key factors for a successful health system. Furthermore, three crucial functions are used to achieve these terms, including: revenue collection, such as taxation, risk pooling which is a technique used to protect people from unsuspected expenditure and purchasing which is the process that used pay government to pay the provider of health such as health workers.(World Health Orgnisation, 2018b). However, in 2014, the total health expenditure in Australia was around 9.9% of the total GDP and Nigeria was around 3.7%(World Health Orgnisation, 2018a, 2018c). Therefore, in order to illustrate these significant differences, a comparison between (HICs) such as Australia and low-middle income countries (LMICs) such as Nigeria, will be taken into consideration in this essay. This will be done by focusing on the health financing systems for Australia and Nigeria and reform in this sector and some recommendations that may help to protect the poor society will be given.

The Sources of financing for the healthcare systems in Australian and Nigerian: -

Government sectors are responsible for most of the health funds in Australia. According to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2016), between 2013 and 2014, around 68% of the health expenditure was primarily covered by governments. While the Australian government was responsible for 41%, state and territory governments contributed around 27% of total health expenditure. In addition, the non-government expenditure was around 32%. The distribution of this percentage was between the private sector 8.3% and the out of pocket expenditure which was around 18.8% from the total the health expenditure between 2013 and 2014. On the other hand, the contribution of the government is still low which was around 6.7% in 2012(Ejughemre, 2014). One of the main ways the Nigerian government collects revenue for financing its health care system, is mostly from pooled and un-pooled sources. Pooled sources are mainly from direct and indirect taxation, donor funding and budgetary allocation. Also, Un-pooled sources account for a disproportionate amount of 70% contribution to health expenditure. Moreover, the health expenditure from formal and informal payments to health care professionals during the time of service was 90% of the total health expenditure, compared to 10% for payments of medical products and goods(Uzochukwu et al., 2015). Although Nigeria has multiple ways to make payments for health services, the regional areas are still unequal in terms of expenditure.