Many health ministries fail to enforce regulations that they themselves have created or are supposed to implement in the public interest. Most of the lowest placed countries are in sub-Saharan Africa where life expectancies are low. HIV and AIDS are major causes of ill-health. Because of the AIDS epidemic, healthy life expectancy for babies born in 2000 in many of these nations has dropped to 40 years or less. One key recommendation from the report is for countries to extend health insurance to as large a percentage of the population as possible.
Insurance protects people against the catastrophic effects of poor health.
In other words, illness forces them into debt. In designing the framework for health system performance, WHO broke new methodological ground, employing a technique not previously used for health systems. It compares each country's system to what the experts estimate to be the upper limit of what can be done with the level of resources available in that country. It also measures what each country's system has accomplished in comparison with those of other countries. As we develop it further and strengthen the raw data used for these measures in the years to come, we believe this will be an increasingly useful tool for governments in improving their own health systems.