Priority-Setting in Health: Building Institutions for Smarter Public Spending

Abstract

Health donors, policymakers, and practitioners continuously make life-and-death decisions about which type of patients receive what interventions, when, and at what cost. These decisions—as consequential as they are—often result from ad hoc, nontransparent processes driven more by inertia and interest groups than by science, ethics, and the public interest. The Center for Global Development’s Priority-Setting Institutions for Global Health Working Group recommends creating and developing fair and evidence-based national and global systems to more rationally set priorities for public spending on health.