Effectiveness of health insurance and its impact on rural health development

Abstract

Background: Providing health insurance or health security for poor people continues to be one of the most important unresolved policy issues for the world. Most rural and informal sector workers in the world do not have any form of health insurance. And in most developing countries, the rural and informal sectors constitute the bulk of the population. Emerging and re-emerging new diseases Medical service are being expensive in the recent years because of the advancement of new technologies and increasing demand for quality of care, changing life styles and poor health accessibility in the rural areas. Methods: Anon experimental descriptive exploratory research design was followed. The population of this study consisted of all those people who were involved in the Health Insurance Scheme launched by various organizations. 105 household was taken from Kirtipur Municipality. Results: 96.2%of total 105 respondents have getting accessibility through existing Health Insurance scheme and most of them42.9%have got free bed at the time of admission in the hospital, 43.8%free operation charge, 74.3% have got free health check up and 4.8% have got free lab tests. Conclusion: Health Insurance Scheme is important indicators of quality services delivered by the scheme. Patient satisfaction is an important factor for willingness to pay. Quality of service is one of the determining factors for rural people to join the Health Insurance Scheme. On the basis of the study finding, it was concluded that awareness program on Health Insurance Scheme should be conducted for the community people, is necessary for the people and premium rate of existing HIS to be lowered, coverage area of the Scheme to be increased for making effective Health Insurance Scheme. Key words: Rural, Health Insurance The full text of this paper is available at Journal of Institute of Medicine website