Benefits of Health Insurance among the poor insured people of Balochistan

Abstract

The Province of Balochistan is the poorest province of Pakistan with very limited resources of healthcare facilities mostly in respect of healthcare providers due to which the population is suffering with lack of healthcare services throughout the region. The Government of Pakistan initiated a health insurance program for the people living with less than 2 dollar per day income to provide healthcare services to such people who are not able to have the healthcare services through their own income and mostly were pushed towards death due to unaffordability in respect of out of pocket expenditures. The five districts among 33 districts were selected in the initial phase of this program to insure such people from the province of Balochistan in 2016. The state life corporation of Pakistan (Insurance Company) was awarded the mandate by the federal government for the health insurance services. Articles reviewed regarding health insurance schemes in different developing countries for knowledge attitude where it has come to knowledge that the health insurance has well resulted in many countries among the insured people who availed the benefits of insurance policy, some studies expressed that people were not aware of benefits of health insurance system due to lack of knowledge about insurance plans and some even didn’t knew about the health insurance system. The awareness plays a vital role to such people to get the benefits of insurance schemes. The secondary data obtained from the Health Department Government of Balochistan for this study and analyzed via Microsoft Excel 2010 and SPSS. The measures found the percentages of the insured people among the population and the people who got treatments against the health insurance. The data included all of those people who were inpatients in the same district hospital and other district hospitals as well. It has been found that the head of the families (card holder) had the treatment with 65.2%, the wives 20.5%, the child with 8.5%, son/daughter 5.6% and the husbands with 0.2 % among the beneficiaries. This health insurance for poor people was a good initiative, the ratio of beneficiaries who were facilitated and availed of treatments through insurance companies among the insured population was very low, and the stakeholders said that lack of awareness was the main cause of the low ratio of treated people within the insured population. The delay in payments of premiums from the federal government to the insurance company also played a role for fewer beneficiaries, this caused the delay payments to healthcare providers and the health care providers lost the interest to provide services to the insured people. Private hospitals do not take interest in special care treatments to the insured. The same disappointed the insured people and avoided treatment against the insurance scheme. The decisions were centralized at federal level and lack of coordination also found in between federal and provincial level. The Health Insurance schemes are highly helpful for developing and low income countries where the health services provision is very difficult due to financial hardship as well as lack of skilled human resource, communications, and proper referral system. The Province of Balochistan is needed to implement health insurance in the entire province to provide healthcare services to the scattered population. The pilot phase gave low results but there is an opportunity to increase the beneficiaries of the health insurance scheme with proper awareness of communities and with good governance to save many lives who can suffer due to non-availability of services.