Editorial: Bridging community-based health insurance and social protection for health care – a step in the direction of universal coverage?
Bart Jacobs, Maryam Bigdeli, Maurits van Pelt, Por Ir, Cedric Salze and Bart Criel (2008). In Tropical Medicine and International Health, Vol 13 (2), Feb 2008, pp 140–143. doi:10.1111/j.1365-3156.2007.01983.x
From the article:
"One response to the difficulty of providing insurance coverage for people in the informal sector is the development of community-based health insurance.
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Several [social protection programmes] aim at enabling access to health services by the poor by reducing barriers to the uptake of existing services or providing incentives for their uptake.
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Our hypothesis is that an articulation between community-based health insurance and social protection programmes … could contribute to improve administrative efficiency, to strengthen the purchasing power of demand-side organizations …, to avoid unnecessary and stigmatizing fragmentation of funds, and to eventually scale up the coverage of social protection for health care. We therefore plead for careful piloting of local initiatives linking community-based health insurance and social protection programmes."