Health Insurance Handbook : How to Make It Work
Many countries that subscribe to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have committed to ensuring access to basic health services for their citizens. Health insurance has been considered and promoted as the major financing mechanism to improve ac...
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000333037_20120108233848 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2227 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/5913 |
| Summary: | Many countries that subscribe to the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have committed to
ensuring access to basic health services for their citizens.
Health insurance has been considered and promoted as the
major financing mechanism to improve access to health
services, as well as to provide financial risk protection.
In Africa, several countries have already spent scarce time,
money, and effort on health insurance initiatives. Ethiopia,
Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Tanzania are just a few
of them. However, many of these schemes, both public and
private, cover only a small proportion of the population,
with the poor less likely to be covered. In fact, unless
carefully designed to be pro-poor, health insurance can
widen inequity as higher income groups are more likely to be
insured and use health care services, taking advantage of
their insurance coverage. The purpose of this handbook is to
provide policy makers and health insurance designers with
practical, action-oriented support that will deepen their
understanding of health insurance concepts, help them
identify design and implementation challenges, and define
realistic steps for the development and scaling up of
equitable, efficient, and sustainable health insurance
schemes. The handbook takes policy makers and health
insurance designers through a step-by-step series of
considerations and tasks that need to be achieved. The
handbook's philosophy is to not be dogmatic,
ideological, or prescriptive. This handbook was prepared to
be used in a six-day regional workshop. Clearly, health
insurance design is an intensive political and technical
process that takes much longer than six days. The
expectation for the workshop is that by the end of the week,
each team has a clear idea of next steps that they could
take back home to engage other stakeholders and move toward
scaling up and improving the performance of health insurance
in their country. |
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