An assessment of alternative financing policies using an overlapping-generations general equilibrium model
The workshop, entitled “Who bears the burden of Universal Health Coverage in Palestine? An assessment of alternative financing policies using an overlapping-generations general equilibrium model” – eponymously named after the research paper – featured two of the paper’s authors: Dr. Mohammad Abu-Zaineh and Sameera Awawda.
Abu-Zaineh, an Associate Professor and the INSERM-AMU Chair of Excellence in Health Economics and Policy at Aix-Marseille University, and Awawda, a Ph.D. candidate in Health Economics at Aix-Marseille University and research assistant at the Institute of Community and Public Health, discussed the findings of the paper, which revolved around the feasibility and sustainability of UHC in the particular context of the occupied Palestinian territories.
In the paper, the authors show that an ad hoc expansion of the coverage of the population and health care costs may lead to a sizable fiscal deficit, indicating that UHC may not be sustainable, unless a fiscal consolidation policy is undertaken in the short-run. The authors addressed the questions of fiscal sustainability and intergenerational inequality of UHC-oriented reforms using a specifically calibrated overlapping generations model within a general equilibrium framework (OLG-CGE) and applied microsimulation technique to evaluate alternative financing strategies to finance UHC; viz. deferred-debt-finance and current and phased-manner finance policies.
From an economic perspective, among the policy options, authors examined, the current consumption taxation policy emerged as the best policy option in terms of its impact on fiscal
sustainability and intergenerational inequalities. However, from a policy perspective, the capacity of governments to raise additional revenues might be constrained in the short-term. Under such circumstances, the authors indicate that deferred-debt finance may be preferred. A situation in which policy-makers may have to trade-off fiscal sustainability against intergenerational inequality.
You can access the full text of the paper by clicking here.