Faculty Associate Lawrence Were Authors Article on Universal Health Coverage

Lawrence Were, a Lecturer in the Department of Health Sciences at BU’s Sargent College and a Faculty Associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently authored an article in the The Lancet Global Health.

In the article, titled “Informality and health: universal health coverage in the era of SDGs,” Were notes that the regions with high disease burdens that would benefit most from the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of universal health coverage (UHC) are also often characterized by “informality,” the prevalence of “firms, workers, and activities that operate outside the legal and regulatory frameworks or outside the modern economy.” About 70 percent of workforces in developing countries are employed informally, limiting access to health care as many people are dependent on out-of-pocket payments.

To achieve the SDG targets for UHC in the face of such prevalent informality in developing countries, Were argues for innovative strategies for financing health care, including community-based insurance and variants of national-level schemes like those in China and Mexico. He also calls on health care innovations to take advantage of mobile phone technologies, which can be used for direct billing, collection of insurance premiums, and the development of health savings products.

Click here to read the article.