U.K. foundation looks to high-income countries to identify options to fund health and social care

The U.K.'s Health Foundation's working paper explores how 16 high-income countries - including Canada - have thought about and implemented changes to their funding systems for health and social care to better meet the challenges ahead. Among the report's conclusions:

• Most reviewed countries fund healthcare primarily from public sources, such as taxation and mandatory health insurance, but funding of social care often relies more than healthcare on individuals paying privately;
• Health and social care funding reforms tend to be incremental rather than radical, are path-dependent, and are catalyzed by changes in economic conditions rather than by rising demand for care; and
• High-income countries have taken diverse approaches to tackling the need to increase health and social care funding and there is no single optimal, or commonly preferred, solution to achieving sustainable revenues.