Informal payments for health care: A threat to human security?

Sammanfattning: The field of international security has changed significantly during the last decades. New security issues has risen on the agenda, and the concept of human security has diverted the attention of security studies from an exclusively state-centric focus towards a broader comprehension of who should be protected, and from what. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate an aspect of such a novel security issue, namely informal payments for health care as a form of corruption, and to evaluate its consequences from a human security perspective. Furthermore, the particular conditions in Lithuania regarding this subject will be examined, and the findings will be related to the conceptual debate on human security. The main findings of the study is that informal payments can constitute a threat to human security in a variety of ways; primarily by acting as a deterrent towards seeking care and lowering utilization of health services for poor people, and by imposing significant asset losses on patients. It was also found that informal payments is most severe in various specialized parts of the health care sector.