Sustainable health financing

Sustainable health systems require strong health financing policies. This includes exploring additional taxes and other government revenue sources for health. However, country practice shows that raising more taxes will only be effective in increasing health system performance if overall budgetary governance and health sector resource allocation tools are effective. Without strong governance structures, higher taxes will lead to wasteful and ineffective spending. Creating a rapid assessment tool would indicate areas where reform initiatives should focus. Using information from this tool, the OECD could benchmark countries compared to international best practices in health financing, budgetary governance and tax policies. This would enable the OECD to provide policy advice to individual countries to address the governance challenges identified.