Health Economics Research Network (HERN), ARK Foundation, Centre for Health Economics (CHE) of University of York and DiaDem have jointly arranged a webinar on ‘Health Insurance in LMICs: The Solution or A Bad Idea’ on January 10, 2023 at Bangladesh time 7 pm and UK Time.1:00 pm.

In this session, we had Abdo Yazbeck as the chief speaker and special guest. He is a Lead Health and Labor Economist with 30 years of work experience in development economics. Through a 22-year career at the World Bank, he managed the Health Team for Europe, Eastern and Southern Africa, served as a Program Leader and Lead Trainer for the World Bank Institute. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Health Systems and Reform and faculty at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Currently he is working as an independent consultant supporting USAID, World Bank, WHO, Global Fund projects, as well as the private sector. 

The agenda of the webinar was to distill the main policy messages from the last few years of published literature on the applicability and relevance of health insurance systems for low and low middle-income countries. The presentation focused on two papers on health insurance in LMICs. The first paper is regarding the challenges with labor tax health insurance, while the second paper sheds light on the challenges with contributory health insurance. Besides, the presentation also incorporated summary of recent other researches on the relevance of health insurance for LMICs.

SM Abdullah, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Dhaka and a Research Fellow at ARK Foundation chaired the webinar. Besides the honorable members of HERN; academics, experts, researchers, development professionals, and students from different institutions (research organizations, NGOs and INGOs, public and private universities) joined the webinar. Participant from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Ghana, Nigeria and UK attended the webinar, which made the question answer session more vibrant.

In order to promote population health, the Health Economics Research Network (HERN) aims to establish a platform that will encourage high-quality research in the field of health economics. Since increasing capacity is a top concern, HERN aims to host more webinars and interactive sessions on different topics on health economics related issues.

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Newsletter written by –

Fariha Islam Munia,

Secretariat, Health Economics Research Network (HERN)