Health Insurance and Health Insurance Developing

 

Health Insurance

Many developing countries, including Bangladesh, are affected by a “Double Burden” of disease and scare of resources (World Health Organization 95). Unprecedented population growth and the emergence of new and chronic diseases have placed extra demands on health services. Despite massive efforts to combats such problems in Bangladesh, recent studies maintain that the resource base is sufficient studies to meet neither future needs nor planned services. In Bangladesh about 64% of the health expenditure come from the “out of pocket of the house hold” 33% is provided by the government sector and the remaining comes from the NGOs services. In a resource poor country, like Bangladesh, to ensure the compulsory health facilities for all, the government cannot bear such huge amount of money to provide the health services to the people. In rural Bangladesh, many agricultural co-operatives were established by the government a decade or more ago as ‘merchant’ association for the collective purchase of fertilizers and others inputs in agriculture and the marketing of crops. Few of them still exist. Recently more successful micro-credit co-operatives in the poorer households have been initiated by Non Government Organizations to stimulate small-scale entrepreneurship. There are about 16000 NGOs who are working in different areas for the well-being of the rural poor’s in various manners since the inception of the country. Only a few of them deliver health care services and receive subsidies from national trust and international donor agencies. However, in recent years, since the late 80s, a number of health insurance schemes were initiated by these NGOs on a pilot basis. Though the functions and the performances of all of these NGOs have not been evaluated till to date through any national survey but very few of them have become successful to provide proper health care services to the poor needs.

Health Insurance is a risk sharing mechanism employed to harness private funds for health care and to reduce the financial barrier faced by individuals when seeking health care. The social health insurance has two prime functions that merits separate considerations, although they are intrinsically linked. The first is a financial function which is to provide a pool of funds to cover all or part, of the cost of health care for those who contribute to pool and to encourage providers and consumers to use health services in a very cost effective manner. The second prime function of the social health insurance scheme is social, including social equity. Health insurance is to remove the financial barriers to obtaining health care at the time of illness for the vulnerable groups in the society i.e. the very young, the elderly and chronically ill.

Social health insurance aims at protection from low probability and catastrophic loss like illness or injury. By pooling financial contributions from a large number of populations and pooling individual risk on a large scale (risk sharing), health insurance plans can cover the health expenditure, such as hospitalization, outpatients, medical care, drugs and sometimes also compensate the loss of revenues. The term health insurance is used to denote health promotion, prevention and health care. Large segment of the world’s rural population and many people in the urban informal sector has no access to health services and remain vulnerable to the full financial cost of illness. This happens mostly in low and middle income countries. Most of the countries have some forms of public provision of health services but less and less countries can provide a full range of health services, based on the needs of the populations.

Many developing countries are currently considering the possibility of introducing compulsory healthy insurance schemes. One reason is to attract more resources to the health sector. A second reason is dissatisfaction with existing services in which staff motivation is poor, resources are not used to advantage and patients are not treated with sufficient courtesy and respect.