Towards A “New Normal” in Health Policies in The Arab Countries

This paper reviews the impacts of COVID19 on health policies in the Arab region, benchmarking them against progress towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC). UHC aims to provide Access to Acceptable Affordable Quality Care for all, which is now endorsed as a key pillar of Sustainable Development Goals regionally and globally. Before COVID19, despite some progress, most countries displayed deficient and maldistributed health structures and provisions, and pernicious inequities in health outcomes and access to healthcare, reflecting systemic gaps in health coverage and financial risk protection. The transition towards fairer health financing mixes is lagging, with protection tilted towards richer quintiles and the formal sector. Large swathes of its population still shoulder one to two thirds of health spending from their own pockets. These swathes are concentrated among the poor and informal sectors, highlighting the link between health equity, social protection, and labour market vulnerabilities. These fault lines amplified the impacts of the ongoing complex global emergency, with large proportion of the populations battered by increased poverty, trapped in systemic precariousness and informality, and unable to access or afford decent health care. Thus the “new normal” may well be about recognizing that the “old normal” has reached its limits. “New normal” in policies need to include: speeding up the institutional prerequisites for UHC, particularly in financing mixes and supportive digitised information systems; addressing health equity more bluntly; tapping existing national wealth explicitly; and embracing more redistributive and progressive policies. Without these steps, both recovery and reintegration in the world economy will be compromised