Editorial: Bridging community-based health insurance and social protection for health care – a step in the direction of universal coverage?
Tropical Medicine and International Health, Vol 13 (2), Feb 2008, pp 140–143
Overview
The document investigates the difficulty of providing insurance coverage for people in the informal sectorthorough the development of community-based health insurance.
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.
The authors hypothize that an articulation between community-based health insurance and social protection programmes could contribute to improve administrative efficiency, strengthen the purchasing power of demand-side organizations, avoid unnecessary and stigmatizing fragmentation of funds, and to eventually scale up the coverage of social protection for health care. Through the careful piloting of local initiatives linking community-based health insurance and social protection programmes, improvement of this situation is definite possibility.