Population Ageing Financial Sustainability gap for Health systems (PASH) Simulator
With population ageing occurring globally, there is a fear that growing numbers of older people will place unsustainable challenges on health systems. This fear stems from a well-studied assumption that there will be increasing demands for services as people age. However, what hasn’t been as well studied is the gap in health revenue generation. How can we better consider effects on both health revenues and expenditures as the population age mix changes so as to better the sustainability of health financing models?
In a new paper published in Health Policy, WHO Kobe Centre Director Dr Sarah Louise Barber joins leading experts to propose a new tool – The Population Ageing Financial Sustainability gap for Health systems (PASH) Simulator. The PASH Simulator allows policymakers to study this more systematically by simultaneously forecasting how changes in the population age-mix affect both health revenues and expenditures and showing the gap between them over time.
The paper demonstrates the Simulator, using a set of six country scenarios based on data from countries in Europe and the Western Pacific representing a diverse range of health financing systems. The authors conclude that equal attention must be paid to both health revenues and expenditures to steer decision makers towards a more balanced set of policy options to address the challenges of population ageing. By showing the gap and the structural elements that influence it, the new method provides policymakers with a broader set of policy options to consider in an effort to address financing shortfalls.