Rights group highlights global healthcare funding inequalities using WHO data – JURIST
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Thursday that most countries are failing to meet their human rights obligations by not allocating sufficient public funding to ensure the right to health.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently published its Global Health Expenditure Database (GHED), which offers data on healthcare spending across 194 countries and territories since 2022. The database includes information on how much each country spends on health, and how this spending is divided between government and households. In its most recent update, the WHO focused on healthcare spending in 2022, the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, to show how countries responded to the health and economic shocks of the pandemic from a financial perspective.
HRW analyzed the GHED and found that 141 governments spent less than 5 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare through public funding. This 5 percent threshold is a widely accepted international benchmark for assessing adequate public healthcare spending. Most governments did not meet this benchmark in 2022.
HRW emphasized that spending below the 5 percent benchmark is insufficient to guarantee the internationally recognized right to health. Matt McConnell, an economic justice and rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said, “The vast majority of people around the world live in countries where their access to health care is undermined in part by low public funding”.
Furthermore, HRW raised concerns about the growing financial burden on individuals and households. Insufficient public funding shifts the cost of healthcare from governments to people, which can severely restrict access, especially for those with low or unstable incomes.
According to a WHO report on universal health coverage (UHC), approximately 4.5 billion people were not fully covered by essential health services in 2021. In addition, around 2 billion people faced financial hardship due to health-related expenses, with 344 million pushed into extreme poverty because of healthcare costs. These health inequalities are particularly prevalent among disadvantaged populations. Catastrophic out-of-pocket health spending is more common among people living in poorer households or rural areas, especially those with older members.
In response to these disparities, the WHO recommends reorienting health systems using a primary health care approach, with a focus on technical assistance to strengthen national institutions and improve service delivery.
