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Across the globe, a significant portion of the population lacks the essential healthcare services due to the rising cost of such services. To ensure healthcare for all, the idea of universal health coverage has evolved but affordability and equity of health services have become the major concerns in this regard. This paper presents a systematic review that offers a detailed picture of diverse issues of universal healthcare financing. Eight popular databases were thoroughly searched with appropriate keywords for finding relevant articles published within 1980 to 2016. After four constructive iterations with logical constraints, 24 articles were finally selected for finding significant research themes in universal healthcare finance arena. The characteristics of the studies were presented graphically from different aspects such as fields of publication, research approaches, geographic distribution etc. The themes, so found in the review, have been categorized into four broad themes with respective sub-themes. The broad themes were namely A) financing options for healthcare B) medical expenses C) inequality in healthcare finance, and D) development of healthcare finance. This systematic review analyzed the studies, discussed avenues, and concluded with gaps for future research in universal healthcare finance. The synthesis of multifarious concepts in the prevalent literature on financing universal healthcare offered profound insights of universal healthcare arena.
Palas et al. (Sun,) studied this question.