Health Policies and Services in Latin America and the Caribbean. In-Equalities in Coverage and Quality
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Copyright: © 2020 . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
This study analyzes the fragmented health policies and services in Latin America, describing the historical social, economic and political contexts and pressures that frame the process of building fragmented health policies and services, analyzing the public expenses, coverage, generosity and quality of the health plans and services. The methodology integrates bibliographic review, statistical analysis and results of case studies. In 2017, the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) population reached 644 million people, representing 8.68% of the world’s population. LAC is the region with the highest levels of socioeconomic inequality and also the greatest ethnic-racial diversity in the world. In 2010 the LAC’s indigenous population corresponded to 42 million people or 7.8% of that of Latino Americans. Afro-descendants represent between 20% and 30% of the population of the region, or 133 million people (UNDP, 2010; World Bank, 2015).
