AFRO-NETS> Social Reinsurance: A New Approach to Sustainable Community Health Financing

[Claudio Schuftan <aviva@netnam.vn>]

Social Reinsurance: A New Approach to Sustainable Community Health Financing
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

New Book

Edited by Alexander S. Preker, David M. Dror
International Labor Organization, World Bank, September 2002
ISBN: 0-8213-5041-2 SKU: 15041
http://publications.worldbank.org/ecommerce/catalog/product?item_id=343845

PDF for Introduction:
http://www1.worldbank.org/publications/pdfs/15041intro.pdf

Seminar October 30, to launch the publication:
http://www1.worldbank.org/hnp/hsd/SocialRe.asp

Text of the announcement: "..Traditional sources of health care fi-
nancing are often inadequate leaving many of the 1.3 billion poor 
people in low and middle-income countries without access to the most 
basic health services. Governments in these countries have tried to 
reach these excluded populations through public clinics and hospi-
tals. To help pay for these services, governments often use a combi-
nation of broad-based general revenues, contributions from the formal 
labor force, and user fees, similar to the financing mechanisms used 
by Western industrial countries. However, these mechanisms are not 
always effective in many developing countries, leaving many of the 
poor without essential health care or financial protection against 
the cost of illness. 

Social Reinsurance details community-based approaches to insuring 
people against medical risk not based on individual risk rating as in 
private insurance, but rather using decentralized social insurance 
based on the average risk. This book shows how the concept of social 
insurance can be implemented in countries that do not have the capac-
ity to finance or organize large-scale systems. It also details the 
strategies and public policies that countries can use to mitigate the 
shortcomings of community-financing plans designed along the lines of 
micro-insurance. Reinsurance is stressed as a tool for enlarging the 
risk pool and spreading risks across larger population groups, which 
no single micro-insurance scheme can do on its own. Social Reinsur-
ance also discusses other measures to strengthen micro-insurance-
based community-financing programs.

This volume provides an important review of health-financing policy 
for rural and informal-sector workers in low- and middle-income coun-
tries. 

--
Claudio Schuftan
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn

--
To send a message to AFRO-NETS, write to: afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe, write to: majordomo@usa.healthnet.org
in the body of the message type: subscribe afro-nets OR unsubscribe afro-nets
To contact a person, send a message to: afro-nets-help@usa.healthnet.org
Information and archives: http://www.afronets.org