Financing Health Care in Nasarawa State, Nigeria: Assessment of the Universal Health Coverage (UHC)

Abstract

There are many challenges confronting health sector in Nasarawa State, but the issue of inadequate financing of healthcare is a worrisome. And the effects it has caused to the universal health coverage are great. The major factor hindering the path of sustainable health care delivery is poor funding. The health sector requires adequate funding in order to make health services available and affordable to the public. The State government introduced the UHC because it considered healthcare so demanding due to dwindling economy and poverty in the State. More importantly, the introduction of the policy was to guarantee good and qualitative access to efficient healthcare services for all citizens such that it could reduce catastrophic household out-of-pocket health expenditure. Since its introduction and resuscitation in the State, actual implementation of the policy by the State appeared not to have yielded desired result. In the face of achieving UHC, successful financing of health care system continues to be a challenge to the policy. This study therefore made an attempt to situate the impact of financing healthcare on the overall universal health coverage of Nasarawa State. Adopting a structural functionalist approach as a theoretical framework and relying on secondary sources of data, the study
revealed the state's low level of coverage among the target population of the policy was recorded which also affects quality of health services provided. The study recommended among others that the state government in collaboration with relevant stakeholders should intensify optimal coverage on the UHC policy. It also suggested increased funding for health programs through increase budgetary allocation to the health sector in the State. The paper concludes that to achieve universal coverage using financing as the strategy, there is a dire need to review the system of financing health care and ensure that resources are used more efficiently while at the same time removing financial barriers to access by shifting focus from OOPs to other hidden resources.