Key messages
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The crucial policy question about the private sector is not its performance in isolation, or relative to the public sector, but the extent to which it supports or detracts from progress towards universal health coverage.
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There is a dearth of evidence about factors affecting the overall performance of health systems, showing the complexity and heterogeneity of the private health-care sector and the difficulty in exploring the relations between factors, and their effect on overall performance.
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Deriving population benefit from the private health-care sector will require interventions that target the sector as a whole, rather than individual providers alone.