<br><span class="gmail_quote">From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Kathleen Ford</b> <a href="mailto:KFord@projecthope.org">KFord@projecthope.org</a><br><br></span>Thailand Has Achieved Near-Universal Coverage Under Its "30 Baht" Program<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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 <a href="http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.28.3.w457">http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.28.3.w457</a><br>
<br>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 <a href="http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.28.3.w467">http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.28.3.w467</a><br>
<br>Health Affairs is pleased to make these articles freely accessible for two weeks.<br><br>