Health

The human right to health means that everyone has the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, which includes access to all medical services, sanitation, adequate food, decent housing, healthy working conditions, and a clean environment.

Private sector involvement in the health sector is the subject of a lot of discussion in the development community. And it is absolutely necessary to have this debate. Can we explore the benefits of the private sector while ensuring development gains?

In European development policy they focus on strengthening all areas of health systems. In other words: they are looking at the big picture. It is not enough to look only at providing health care, but they need to also ensure that there are enough qualified health workers, that the financing of the sector is ensured and that people can actually afford the medicines they need. They have to find solutions to all of these, if they want to achieve universal and affordable health coverage. This is true for public interventions, as well as for initiatives with the involvement of the private sector.

It should be noted that private sector actors — including social enterprises and private companies alike — are already part of many health systems as financiers or service providers. In some countries, private actors even clearly dominate. In low- and middle-income countries, government spending on health is so low that patients and their families have to bootstrap their health care out of their own pockets, which of course exacerbates already existing inequalities. To help address these challenges, they are exploring various innovative financing systems, from community-based insurance schemes to private health insurance.

It is not difficult to see that increased engagement with the private sector offers incredible opportunities and at the same time carries risks. They sometimes tend to overestimate the benefits of engagement and underestimate the risks. That is why it is all the more important to look out for win-win situations — solutions, in which business opportunities contribute to their overarching objective of universal health coverage.

Luckily, they do not have to start from scratch. They have a lot of lessons that they can draw on, for example their work with The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — two public-private initiatives, with whose help they have managed to save and improve millions of lives. They taught us about both the opportunities and the risks when partnering up with the private sector to make global health systems more resilient and more sustainable. And one thing is clear: We will need to strengthen all levels to regulate the health market for the common good — from the regional to the national to the global level

Focusing at the country level

All health systems in the European Union are based on shared values, yet there is great variation in how these systems operate. The same is true for their partnerships with countries outside the EU. With the strong ownership of each respective country, they pay great attention to the local context. They must never forget that when they talk about health, they talk about people, and people's needs differ from country to country, and from context to context.

This is why they support their partners such as the World Health Organization at the regional and at the country level to engage eye-to eye as co-facilitator and coordinator with partner governments. They do this, for example, through the so-called EU-Luxembourg-WHO Universal Health Coverage Partnership Programme. And they are not the only ones: 28 countries have joined us in this endeavor — to date with some 61 million euros of support — and another 25 countries have expressed their strong interest to join the partnership. We have taken action to make our policy dialogue comprehensive and inclusive, and even going beyond the health sector to a broader discussion of financing social services. But we need the engagement of the private sector to really reach as many beneficiaries as possible.

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