What are the challenges for private health insurance schemes?
• Private health insurance schemes also require using public resources, e.g., for regulation to ensure equity, affordability and access to health services. Whether government resources are better spent on regulation or on public programmes should be weighed carefully. • Private health insurances are voluntary and take time to build up a membership base, especially in countries where the understanding of and experience with insurance among the population is limited. • Private health insurance is usually not affordable to large sections of the population. • Private health insurance is unsuitable to serve as a mechanism to achieve universal coverage in social health protection since it does not offer satisfactory protection for the poor or for high-risk individuals. • Because they are voluntary, private insurance schemes have the problem of adverse selection (healthier people will not be interested in joining, whereas high-risk individuals will have strong incentives to join), which in tu
