Vietnam Sets Health Insurance Goals

From 1992-2010, 80 percent of clinics in Vietnam have provided services to people with health insurance. An additional 10 million children and 15 million adults (students) are expected to register for health insurance policies this year and Vietnam’s goal is to have the entire population insured by 2014.

By March 2009, people with insurance policies accounted for about 44 percent of all Vietnamese citizens. There are three kinds of health insurance: mandatory and voluntary insurance and insurance for the poor. Thus far, about 1,900 State and non-State clinics and 80 percent of all commune and ward medical stations have signed contracts to provide healthcare to insured citizens. The development of commune-based healthcare services has also helped improve first aid and healthcare services for people, including those who are insured, in rural, remote areas.

The health insurance fund has increased annually to provide a significant amount of state funding for healthcare. It promotes social welfare and healthcare-related equality.

Health insurance was made part of a law that took effect on July 1, 2009. Vietnam set a target of having all citizens insured by 2014. The law specifies and defends the interests of health insurance policy owners, including the rights to modern, hi-tech health care, and preventive medicine and rehabilitation services.

The health insurance fund will finance cancer diagnosis and the transportation of patients from small, rural clinics to more modern facilities. This was designed for people such as children less than six years-old and people making a contribution to the nation’s revolutionary cause.

The law says that a health insurance policy owner can have 80 to 95, or in some cases all, of a person’s disease diagnosis and treatment fees funded by the health insurance fund. By-laws govern cases where the cost of health care exceeds that which is allocated by the health insurance fund. The law permits health insurance policy owners to choose a clinic at which they can benefit from health insurance fund-financed healthcare.

Although health insurance fund-financed healthcare has achieved encouraging results, there are still a number of problems. Many patients complain about the service quality and related complicated procedures. Doctor Nguyen Van Chau, head of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Health, said that having to stand in long queues is one major problem. The city’s health sector has worked to apply different solutions to improve healthcare services for policy owners, including overtime hours for doctors and other staff, phone-based registration and consultancy, computerizing disease diagnosis and treatment profile management and prescription writing, establishing more testing centers, and more. These solutions have helped ease the overload at clinics, decrease costs and patients’ discomfort and improve the quality of health services for health insurance policy owners.

The Ministry of Health kicked off the program ‘Improving service quality in clinics serving health insurance policy owners’. This program improves healthcare services, simplifies administrative procedures and controls drug and testing abuse. More efforts are being generated to renovate health insurance-related payment towards making clinics take the initiative in the payment./.

Tags: Vietnam Health Insurance, Vietnam insurance industry, Vietnam insurance sector

Posted by VBN on Apr 21 2010. Filed under Insurance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry