London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Universal health coverage means ensuring that everyone can obtain essential health services at high quality without suffering financial hardship.

Writing in The Lancet ahead of the United Nations summit on the Sustainable Development Goals, the experts say this is a crucial moment for global leaders to reflect on financial investments to maximise progress by 2030.

The authors say: "Our global society has a vested interest in investing in health to transform lives and livelihoods... Health systems oriented toward universal health coverage, immensely valuable in their own right, produce an array of benefits: in times of crisis, they mitigate the effect of shocks on communities; in times of calm, they foster more cohesive societies and productive economies."

The declaration was made by economists on every continent, five Nobel Laureates, current and former Chief Economists of the World Bank and leading experts in health and development economics.

Signatories from the School include: Professor Anne Mills, Deputy Director & Provost and Professor of Health Economics and Policy; Professor Richard Smith, Dean of the Faculty of Public Health & Policy and Professor of Health System Economics; Kara Hanson, Professor of Health System Economics and co-director of the RESYST (Resilient and Responsive Health Systems) consortium; and Dr Anna Vassall, Senior Lecturer in Health Economics.

They urge that:

• Heads of government increase domestic funds for convergence and provide vocal political leadership to implement policy reforms toward pro-poor UHC
• Donor countries meet their pledges for international development assistance and commit to investing in the global functions of DAH, particularly research and development for diseases of poverty
• Development financing discussions explicitly address equity, including who pays domestically and who benefits
• National policy makers embrace UHC, as defined above, as an integrated approach for measuring progress toward health targets in the post-2015 global development framework

The authors conclude that universal health coverage is "the affordable dream".

Video: watch our Make Health Fair calling for action on health inequalities:

Publication:

• Lawrence H Summers et al. Economists' Declaration on Universal Health Coverage. The Lancet. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00242-1

Related links:

• Read the School's Health Economics publication
• Universal Health Coverage Day website
• RESYST (Resilient and Responsive Health Systems) website
• Download the Research for Universal Health Coverage publication (PDF)
• Prof Kara Hanson writes about universal health coverage in the Huffington Post