PHA-Exch> Health Affairs-Moving to Universal Coverage: The Thai Experience

[Claudio Schuftan]

From: Kathleen Ford KFord at projecthope.org

Thailand Has Achieved Near-Universal Coverage Under Its "30 Baht" Program

Through its 2001 health reforms, Thailand has achieved near-universal health
coverage while avoiding the supply constraints and the informal
under-the-table payments that have hampered efforts to expand coverage in
other developing nations. The Thai reforms have greatly reduced the
incidence of catastrophic out-of-pocket spending among the country's
households, particularly among the poor.

These findings are contained in two papers published today on the Health
Affairs Web site. In one paper, Kannika Damrongplasit and Glenn Melnick
report that, through 2005, Thailand had added 13.6 million people to its
insurance rolls since the 2001 enactment of its "30 baht" program. In a
second, Tewarit Somkotra and Leizel Lagrada find that the Thai households
that remain at risk for catastrophic health spending are predominantly
richer households who seek care at private facilities, where care is
perceived to be of higher quality but where public insurance does not apply.

You can read the paper by Damrongplasit, a postdoctoral research fellow at
the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Public Health, and
Melnick, a senior economist at RAND and the Blue Cross of California Chair
of Health Care Finance at the University of Southern California in Los
Angeles, at
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.28.3.w457

You can read the paper by Somkotra, a lecturer of dentistry at Chulalongkorn
University in Thailand, and Lagrada, a researcher of health policy sciences
at Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan, at
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.28.3.w467

Health Affairs is pleased to make these articles freely accessible for two
weeks.
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