The equity impact of the universal coverage policy: Lessons from Thailand

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis for Antidepressants and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Major Depression in Thailand

“…Even recently, the health insurance schemes that covered all Thai people-6 million (9%) covered by the Civil Servant Medical Benefit Scheme, 10 million (16%) covered by the Social Health Insurance scheme, and the rest of the population (47 million) covered by the Universal Coverage scheme [13]-estimated that only 4% of psychiatric patients received treatment [14]. In Thailand, resources currently allocated to meet the needs of patients with mental disorder are scarce [15].…”

Multicriteria Decision Analysis for Including Health Interventions in the Universal Health Coverage Benefit Package in Thailand

“…All Thai citizens are covered by a public health plan (the Civil Servant Medical Benefit Scheme for civil servants, state enterprise employees, and their dependents; the Social Security Scheme for private sector employees; and the UC for the rest of the population). Because these plans hold different agreements with health providers, there is growing concern about the inequity in health services delivered to beneficiaries of the different plans [15]. The panel acknowledged the differences in intervention coverage between the health plans, and across the country, and therefore the importance of this criterion.…”

“…One of the objectives of the UC is to protect household income from catastrophic health expenditure [16,17]. The literature defines catastrophic expenditure as households' spending on direct health care costs (e.g., medicines) that exceeds 10% of households' expenditure [15,18,19]. The panel adopted this definition to establish the scoring scale of this criterion.…”

Universal health care in Thailand: Concerns among the health care workforce

“…While there are limitations to services and medications that are included in the UC, the cover is expanding, with for example the inclusion of antiretroviral HIV/AIDS medications in 2003 [14]. It has been noted that the UC and the policies leading up to the UC: have increased access [11,15,16]; increased equity [11,15,16]; reduced cost [11,15,16]; and strengthened provision of primary health care [17]. This paper investigates some important caveats in this policy, as subjectively perceived by health care professionals through a qualitative study.…”

“…The Thai Rak Thai government implemented the taxfunded UC on a populist platform in October 2001 [1,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Initially, this policy gave general access to public health service providers with a flat co-payment of 30 Thai baht (US$0.70-0.80), although this co-payment was later abolished.…”