Monday, December 1, 2008

World Health Organization Report on Social Health Insurance Systems

in Western Europe.

It's 313 pages, so, no, I haven't read it yet, but I want the resources at our fingertips when the time comes...

From the introduction:


The concept of social health insurance (SHI) is deeply ingrained in the fabric of health care systems in western Europe. It provides the organizing principle and a reponderance of the funding in seven countries – Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Since 1995, it has also become the legal basis for organizing health services in Israel. Previously, SHI models played an important role in a number of other countries that subsequently changed to predominantly tax-funded arrangements in the second half of the twentieth century – Denmark (1973), Italy (1978), Portugal (1979), Greece (1983) and Spain (1986). Moreover, there are segments of SHI-based health care funding arrangements still operating in predominantly tax-funded countries like Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, as well as in Greece and Portugal. In addition, a substantial number of central and eastern European (CEE) countries have introduced adapted SHI models since they regained control over national policy-making – among them Hungary (1989), Lithuania (1991), Czech Republic (1992), Estonia (1992), Latvia (1994), Slovakia (1994) and Poland (1999).


Also, I'm going to add a topic Tag of "Social Heath Insurance" and cross tag all my "Bismarckian" ones so that it becomes clear they are the same thing.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Two insurance industry trade groups, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, announced that their members are willing to do away with their long-standing practice of denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. They will do so as long as they—the insurance companies—are allowed to continue to set the terms of coverage and the price and everyone is forced to buy one of their policies. Sound familiar? It’s a lot like Massachusetts, where coverage can be so limited as to offer precious little financial security and so expensive as to be unaffordable for tens of thousands of people. cs
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