The Role of Risk-sharing Mechanisms in Finance Health Care and Towards Universal Health Coverage in Low-and Middle-income Countries of World Health Organization Regions

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The costs of health care are increasing worldwide. Patients are compelled to pay more for treatment, causing many people to fall below the poverty line [1], and one of the most urgent and vexing challenges faced by many low-income and middle-income countries is providing health care for the more than 2 billion poor people who live in such nations. Direct outof-pocket (OOP) payments by patients account for as much as 80% of total health care expenditures in low-income countries. Studies in several countries have found that significant medical expenditures are a major cause of poverty. In addition, according to a World Bank report [2], only 11% percent of global health spending corresponded to 90% of the world’s population, with the following distribution among non-developed countries: Asia, 3.5%; the US, 3.2%; Europe, 2.4%; the Middle East and North Africa, 1.5%; and Africa, 0.4%; meanwhile, developed countries accounted for 88.9% of spending [2]. In 2007, 87.5% of the global disease burden was distributpISSN 1975-8375 eISSN 2233-4521