Egypt's Road towards Social Health Insurance - The Road to be Traveled (2)
How much time to be
expected for the Egyptians to be covered by health insurance? It took Egypt
almost half a century to reach half of the Egyptians with health insurance coverage. Does it need Egypt
another half of a century to cover its other half of population?
Some experts predict that it
would take between 35-50 years to achieve universal coverage depending on the
status of economic development of the country. Another group states that these
predictions are based on historical world experience and therefore could be
labeled “conservative”. Let’s have a
look at the experience of some of the well known countries for implementing social
health insurance systems.
It took Germany more than a
century (127 years) to achieve universal health insurance coverage following
its establishment by Bismarck in 1883 by passing its first sickness law and it
seems to be still developing. The largest part, almost 85% of the population,
is covered by a basic national health insurance plan provided by the state,
providing a standard level of coverage. The remainder 15% opted for private
health insurance, which frequently offers additional benefits. It is claimed
that only 0.3% or about 250,000 people in Germany are not insured. A few of
these uninsured people are extremely rich, not needing insurance, and most of
them are poor unable to afford it.
In Japan, it took about 39 years
to achieve universal coverage ignoring that many community-based health insurance
schemes prevailed before that for decades.
The first health insurance law was issued in 1922, delayed its
implementation to 1927 because of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The first
“region-based” national health insurance law was issued in 1938, and was
revised a number of times until universal coverage was declared in 1961 and the
establishment of a Social Insurance Agency in 1962. However, development and
revision of laws continued until maybe 1997 indicating that the process of
development of social health insurance does not stop by achieving universal
coverage but there would be room for further improvement probably to introduce
more efficiency. Still you could note a lot of ongoing debate about health
insurance coverage and costs.
In the Republic of Korea (ROK),
it took 26 years to achieve universal population coverage from the inception of
the statutory Health Insurance Act in 1963. ROK introduced compulsory health
insurance program in 1977, and universal coverage was claimed in 1989. However,
this was preceded by a voluntary program in 1965. The relatively fast transition to universal
coverage is mainly attributed to unexpected impressive increase in the average
annual growth rate in GNP per capita of 13.3 per cent during the period 1977-89.
Further, it took 118 years in Belgium,
79 years in Austria, 72 years in Luxembourg, 48 years in Costa Rica to achieve universal health
insurance coverage. As could be concluded from the above, not only universal
health insurance needs time to grow, develop, and expand, it also happens on
stages mainly depending on a country’s economic development, its ethical value
system and other factors. For example, it
took 40 years in Austria (from 1890 to 1930) for population coverage to grow
from 7 to 60 percent, and then another 35 years (from 1930 to 1965) to reach 96
percent. Further, it took 20 years for SHI to reach population coverage of 17
percent in Costa Rica (from 1941 to 1961), another 5 years to double coverage
to 34 percent (1966), another 12 years to again double coverage to 74 percent
(1978), and then another 13 years to attain 83 percent coverage (1991).
It could be stated that
Egypt introduced its health insurance scheme in 1936 and not as
commonly known in 1964 by issuing Law 64/1936 that established employer’s
responsibilities for work injuries.
Additional 5 laws were issued during the period 1936-1964. A Health
Workers Organization was established in 1961 to provide health care services
for the workers, which later became the Health Insurance Organization
(HIO). However, 1964 was considered the
benchmark for the formal launching of health insurance through issuing a
presidential decree 1209/1964 establishing the HIO taking over the responsibilities
from the General Authority for Social Insurance and building on two laws
defining the SHI premiums for government employees (Law 75/1964) and for public
and private sector employees (Law 63/1964). The HIO started working in
Alexandria with the intention of expanding SHI geographically to other regions
and to the entire population. Later, premiums
were decreased for government employees (Law 32/1975). In the same year 1975,
another law was issued defining additional benefits to government, public and
private sector employees, as well as extending benefits to pensioners and
widows (Law 79/1975). The latter two groups were covered without an employer
contribution. It was not until 1992, that coverage was extended to school
children (Law 99/1992), and followed by extending coverage to pre-school
children (Law 380/1997). If we take in
consideration the evolvement of social health insurance since 1936, then some
people might consider that it took Egypt about 75 years to reach coverage of
health insurance of 57% based on HIO statistics.
Egypt might not be different from
other countries and would need to own the enabling environment that allows
social health insurance coverage to expand to the other half of the population.
This would be the subject of a future blog.
Until we meet again…