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Govt embarks on health insurance

MAHBUBA ZANNAT, back from Bangkok
The government in a pioneering move has set to introduce health insurance programme as an alternative healthcare financing for the country's 5 crore poor people from early next year.
Under the system, each of the poor would be given health insurance card to cover their medical expenses. The government will pay the insurance premium from general taxes as the insurance cost, according to the health ministry.
"We will form a taskforce to this effect this month (July). We would try our best to implement the health insurance programme from early 2012," Prasanta Bhushan Barua, joint chief of the ministry's
Health Economics Unit, told The Daily Star.
As part of the effort, the government delegates recently have visited some neighbouring countries where health insurance has been adopted successfully as an alternative healthcare financing.
Prasanta Bhushan was in the 15-member visiting team to watch the health insurance model in Bangkok, Hyderabad, and Delhi to verify the design, implementation process, and sustainability of health insurance programme in Bangladesh.
"Beginning with a pilot project for the 31 percent of the country's poor people, we would try to scale up for universal health coverage in phases," he said, adding that the first pilot project would begin soon
in Rangunia of Chittagong and Debhata of Satkhira. The two upazilas are home to around 6 lakh people.
The socio-economic study would begin next month to find out the exact figure of the poor people in those localities, he said.
The ministry sources said the taskforce, headed by Health Minister AFM Ruhal Haque, would be the steering body for policy support and supervision of the total programme.
We should devise a way of our own to implement the programme, said the visiting team, adding that a combination of India's Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY) and Rajiv Arogyashri Health Insurance may suit for Bangladesh. The Thai model would be too costly to
implement for this resource-poor country where per capita health expenditure is only $7.5, the team said.
The ministry initially thinks of providing secondary level health services along with some tertiary cares to the poor people under the alternative health financing. The people with health cards would be able to get treatment free of cost in listed public and private hospitals, they said.
Under the RSBY programme, people are provided secondary healthcares. Preparing a card spending Rs 30 only, a five-member family can get the insurance facility up to Rs 30,000 a year. Rajiv Arogyashri Health Insurance programme, however, covers primary to tertiary level healthcare.