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Universal Health Coverage is about the right to health. Everyone – rich or poor – should get the health care they need without suffering financial hardship. Unfortunately, some donors and developing country governments are promoting health insurance schemes that exclude the majority of people and l may also reinforce inequality – by prioritizing people who are formally employed and excluding the most poor and marginalized who cannot afford to pay premiums, especially women., However, a number of developing countries are rejecting this model and prioritizing general government spending for health to successfully scale up health coverage. Funding through progressive taxation and international aid is the key to achieving Universal Health Coverage. Oxfam estimates that improving tax collection in 52 developing countries could raise an additional $269bn – enough to double health budgets in these countries., This paper explains why urgent action on global tax evasion and avoidance is needed to ensure that countries can generate and retain more of their own resources for health. Donors and governments should abandon unworkable insurance schemes and focus on financing that delivers universal and equitable health care for all.

The year 2008 is halfway to the deadline for reaching the Millennium Development Goals. Despite some progress, they will not be achieved if current trends continue. Aid promises are predicted to be missed by $30bn, at a potential cost of 5 million lives. Starting with the G8 meeting in Japan, rich countries must use a series of high-profile summits in 2008 to make sure the Goals are met, and to tackle both climate change and the current food crisis. Economic woes must not be used as excuses: rich countries' credibility is on the line.

Climate change is forcing vulnerable communities in poor countries to adapt to unprecedented climate stress. Rich countries, primarily responsible for creating the problem, must stop harming, by fast cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions, and start helping, by providing finance for adaptation. In developing countries Oxfam estimates that adaptation will cost at least $50bn each year, and far more if global emissions are not cut rapidly. Urgent work is necessary to gain a more accurate picture of the costs to the poor. According to Oxfam's new Adaptation Financing Index, the USA, European Union, Japan, Canada, and Australia should contribute over 95 per cent of the finance needed. This finance must not be counted towards meeting the UN-agreed target of 0.7 per cent for aid. Rich countries are planning multi-billion dollar adaptation measures at home, but to date they have delivered just $48m to international funds for least-developed country adaptation, and have counted it as aid: an unacceptable inequity in global responses to climate change.

As the 2007 German G8 summit approaches, the demands of the millions of anti-poverty campaigners worldwide are clear. G8 leaders must increase and improve aid to provide health, education, water and sanitation for all. They must cancel more debt and deliver trade justice. They must take urgent action to bring peace to the world’s most troubled countries and to halt the devastating impact of climate change. Where action has been taken by G8 countries, lives are being saved. Yet despite some areas of real progress, in the past two years overall progress has fallen far short of promises. The cost of this inaction is millions of lives lost due to poverty. G8 countries must meet their promises to the world.

When the G20 meets in Seoul in November 2010, it has a big choice to make. It can either retreat into a narrow focus on its own interests, or it can prove it is capable of genuine global leadership in the face of the interlinked economic, food, and climate change crises. The G20 must adopt a Seoul ‘development consensus’ that confronts the challenges of the 21st century: reducing inequality and tackling global poverty through sustainable, equitable growth that gives poor women and men, and their governments, the tools they need to overcome poverty.

On 31 March 2006 the Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa announced that from that day on basic health care would be free to everyone. This was made possible partly due to the money saved following the cancellation of Zambia’s $5 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A visit to the clinic for basic medicines, which until then had been the privilege of the few, became the right of all.