The Insurance Commission (IC) is working on the framework of micro-health insurance products which seeks to extend health-care coverage, especially to the marginalized sectors of society.
Insurance Deputy Commissioner Dorothy Calimag said they are in the process of meeting with government agencies to be able to craft the regulatory framework for microhealth products.
“We have meetings with the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. and the Department of Health, and we’ll be coming out soon with a microhealth insurance product,” Calimag told reporters at a recent news conference. “We’re looking forward to that, microinsurance coverage,” she added.
The challenge to achieving universal health-care coverage in the Philippines is how to extend health-care coverage to the informal sector, Calimag said.
According to a research of the UPecon Foundation-Health Equity and Financial Protection in Asia Project, the coverage of the informal sector remains slow.
Under the National Health Insurance Program, the formal sector I enrolled in the social-health insurance program, while those in the informal sector, mostly the self-employed and the near poor, have to enroll voluntarily.
The study showed that the PhilHealth benefit delivery rate (BDR) for in-patient care for the informal sector in 2010 was only 10.51 percent.
The BDR is a summary measure of social health-insurance performance that reflects the enrollment of the target population (coverage rate); its accessibility to beneficiaries (claim rate); and the magnitude of social-health insurance benefits relative to medical expenditures (reimbursement rate).
The IC sees challenges on how to effectively and rationally utilize insurance benefits for beneficiaries and, most important, how to make informal sector enrolled in health-insurance coverage.
Cebuana Lhuillier Insurance Solutions General Manager Jonathan Batangan said Cebuana Lhuillier will be launching a microhealth-insurance product early next year.