A new paper co-authored by Professor Andrew Hayen reviews Indonesia’s national health insurance scheme and its impact on the population – especially on the country’s poorest.
Accessing health services and obtaining financial support for health-related costs is an issue of major equity across the world with an estimated 7.3 billion people globally not having access to essential health services.
Indonesia is a country with approximately 278 million inhabitants and is an example of where national reform has been implemented aiming to reduce these direct patient payments. In 2014 the National Health Insurance scheme was introduced, consolidating many smaller health insurance programs.
This became the biggest single payer health insurance system in the world.
A recent paper ‘The benefits and burden of health financing in Indonesia: analyses of nationally representative cross-sectional data’, co-authored by Professor Andrew Hayen from the School of Public Health at UTS, reviews how the benefits from the burdens of this system were distributed across the population in Indonesia and the impact especially on the country’s poorest. This has important lessons for other governments across the world seeking to understand the concept of Universal Health Coverage, UHC.
The full paper is available in The Lancet Global Health's May 2023 issue, or via their 'In conversation with…' podcast.