Political Economy and Quality of Primary Health Service in Rural Bangladesh and the United States of America: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

We examined the quality of publicly provided primary healthcare service in two different rural settings: USA and Bangladesh. Using both primary and secondary data, the quality of primary healthcare services was examined across four dimensions: access, equity, responsiveness and citizen's influence over services. Findings demonstrate that apart from responsiveness, the US underperforms across all other dimensions of quality. Compared with the US, Bangladesh fared worse in almost all indicators other than physically accessibility. Wider political economy factors that shaped the quality of service were the colonial legacy, political competition, the economic system and social inequality. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Equity in Public Services: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Sometimes, equity is expressed in terms of final outcomes. Osman and Bennett (2018) define it as the absence of systematic and potentially remediable differences in one or more characteristics of health across populations or population groups defined socially, economically, demographically, or geographically.…”

Risking Lives to Save Others During COVID-19: A Focus on Public Health Care Workers in Bangladesh and Egypt

“…The health care systems in Bangladesh and Egypt are pluralistic and complex, combining both public and private providers, whereas the public-sector coverage is comprehensive and remains the cheap caregivers to fulfill the respective governments’ commitment to provide health care to the poor. 17 , 18 This commitment remains generally unachieved as the health sector suffers from a multitude of challenges. As a result, the health care systems of these two countries are characterized by, among other things, rundown public hospitals, widespread corruption, poor access to service, low quality of care, insufficient funding, inadequate or absent health insurance, and unaffordable and mostly unreliable private health care.…”