The World Bank is trying to insure against one of the worst crises in the world: a pandemic. The Economist reports that the World Bank:
…has issued $425m in pandemic bonds to support its new Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF), which is intended to channel funding to countries facing a deadly disease. The bonds cover six viruses likely to spark outbreaks: new influenza viruses, coronaviruses (like SARS and MERS), filoviruses (like Ebola), Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever and Crimean Congo fever. Investors forgo their principal when a virus reaches a predetermined contagion level, based on rate of growth, number of deaths and whether it crosses international borders. The facility covers 77 of the world’s poorest countries.
The World Bank FAQ are here. These FAQ’s provide some interesting precedents in the world of catastrophe bonds.
One example is the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF), designed to provide participating countries with access to affordable and effective coverage against natural disasters. Another example is the Pacific Catastrophic Risk Facility (PCRAFI), a risk insurance pool of five small Pacific islands that was also incubated by the Bank. A third example is the Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool (TCIP), a mandatory scheme for homeowners’ earthquake insurance, which was backed by WBG financing at inception.
This is a interesting proposal to help developing countries secure funding in the case a pandemic occurs. However, if the World Bank invests these funds, one may wonder whether financial markets would crash in the case of a large scale pandemic resulting in an insolvent fund. Let’s hope that does not happen, but I am curious what precautions were taken to avoid this scenarios.
Pandemic Bonds posted first on http://ift.tt/2sNcj5z
On July 23, 1967, I was a girl attending my cousin’s wedding at a swanky hotel in mid-town Detroit. Driving home with my parents and sisters after the wedding, the radio news channel warned us of the blazing fires that were burning in a part of the city not far from where we were on a highway leading out to the suburbs.
Picture me in the back seat of Daddy’s Mercury Monterey, him behind the wheel of the car driving us into the heart of what looked like war-torn streets to me sometime after the area calmed down….the looted stores, the smoky air, the neighbors cleaning up their neighborhoods…what I didn’t know is that 43 people would die as a result of the uprising and police response.
Fast-forward past twenty-plus years working with hospitals, health plans, clinicians, technology developers, consumer goods and electronics companies, financial services and non-profit organizations. Listening to and working with all these stakeholders in health over two+ decades has offered me another kind of education. Today, I share my most important learning with delegates to the AHA meeting: that social factors, and not so much healthcare, are the most important contributors to our community’s health and wellbeing.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: I will point to this cartoon in my talk at the AHA meeting, noting we’re in The Best of Times and The Worst of Times. In healthcare, it feels like the worst of times as in the U.S., we are so challenged by the opioid crisis, costs spiraling, clinician burnout, and consumers health-financially insecure.
Save by spending more on primary care. The rest of the developed world, those OECD nations (to any one of which Mr. Scaramucci, reportedly, would have liked an ambassadorship), all allocate much more spending per capita to primary care than the U.S. does. A strong primary care backbone is the on-ramp to health care and self-care literacy and competency, and costs the system (and taxpayers) less “earlier” than spending “later” when medical conditions and diseases emerge. Here’s some recent research from the successful business people at PwC on 
Save by spending more on social care. Those wealthy nations also spend more on social care per capita, like education and housing. Early childhood education is a building block to literacy, health literacy, good jobs, and a civil society. Safe and clean housing also boosts health: that could be a sound argument for the appointment of Dr. Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). 
Health Populi’s Hot Points: The pharmacy that dispenses prescription drugs is complemented by goods in front of the counter: over-the-counter products that drive 2.9 billion trips annually to purchase OTCs, according to 
Lowering out-of-pocket costs were top-of-mind for Americans as the new year 2017 began, 
Now that the majority of health care providers in the U.S. have indeed purchased and implemented EHRs, it remains for patients, health consumers, and caregivers to take advantage of them. In my post on the EHR Field of Dreams effect, I highlighted 
The general process of a patient requesting their health data works like this, illustrated by the patient journey of Melissa and Ava Crawford, a mother and toddler daughter portrayed in the ONC report:
Health Populi’s Hot Points: Most Americans see their doctors entering medical information electronically, and most people say accessing all kinds of medical information is important, the Kaiser Family Foundation learned in a 
The top benefit of engaging patients with these technologies is to support people in their efforts to be healthy, and to provide input to providers on how patients are doing when not in the clinic, this research found.
For every 4.2% increase in a hospital’s self-pay patient population, the institution’s revenues would fall by 2.8% in Medicaid expansion states. This is based on the combination of a repeal of the Affordable Care Act and more consumers moving to high-deductible health plans.
Health Populi’s Hot Points: This week, 
The Netherlands, France and Germany are the best places to be a patient, based on the Global Access to Healthcare Index, developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
Health Populi’s Hot Points: You’re reading Health Populi and I’m a health economist, so I’ll bring this study back to healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP, shown in the map. Dark blue covering the U.S. represents over 13% of GDP, which is actually 18% today — nearly $1 in every $5 of the national economy. That nearly-20% is also the household budget cost of care for the average American family.