In some previous note, we described the role of HDI in the health sector. Now I am going to clarify HDI in IRAN with support of MOH data presented by Professor Harrirchi.
IRAN’s HDI value for the year of 2012 is 0.742 which means that Iran is in the high human development category. The current position of Iran in the world is 76 out of 187 countries.
According to UNDP calculations between the years 1980 and 2012 Iranian HDI value increased by 67 percent, on an average annual increase as about 1.6% of annual increase that is two- fold more than other countries in high human development category. For all countries around the glob, the average gain was even less (only 0.69 percent). The UNPD report also clarifies that Iran achieved the second highest reduction in HDI shortfall among developing countries during 1990 - 2012. The life expectancy is raised up from 64.8 in 1990 to 75.3 year, in 2013 for the female gender. All of the mortality indexes, as NMR, IMR, and U5MR, decreased considerably but the main weakness remained equity in health expenditure and lack of clinical guidelines for scientific guides of health.
Three main problems of health economics in the country are: low percentage of GDP for health (6 - 7%), high proportion of OOP (out of pocket) payment by people which is a little corrected by current government support (around 50% in total), and ineffective spending health budget and inefficiency of available resources which may be due to lack of responsibility of MOH for scientific control of health market. OOP for in patient cases decreased as much as 33% but in case of out patients, it is continuously increasing. So the government should be more accountable for such kind of data.