Without mandatory health insurance

Azerbaijan without entering a compulsory insurance is going to prevent the export of money abroad for treatment. To do this, it has set up a liquidation plan commission for the treatment of citizens abroad.

Reporters were told by the head of this structure Nasib Guliyev, citizens will soon be treated exclusively here, given the pace of local health care. He said that in the first half of the year the commission received 782 treatment applications and only 2 of them were granted.

According to one of the experts of the Association of Insurance Companies of Azerbaijan, without launching mechanism of compulsory insurance and public confidence in the local health care should not introduce bans. Today, there are many diseases whose treatment is available abroad, and many patients who do not trust the local medicine. All the ministers and heads of departments, even for a survey go to Israel, Germany, Turkey, and even to the U.S., said the source to Turan.

"Actually, the law "On Compulsory Medical Insurance" (CMI) developed with the participation of experts from the World Bank Group (WBG) and submitted to the Cabinet of Ministers of Azerbaijan in 2006 was adopted by the Parliament in 2008 and its implementing decree was signed by the President. However, despite the base, CMI agency under the Cabinet of Ministers has not yet been created," he explained the impasse.

As is known, the main task of CMI is to shift the burden of paying medical expenses from a patient to a specialized agency. The actual implementation of this type of insurance requires a conceptual approach to address the many issues. This funding CMI system (this could be the state budget and compulsory contributions to CMI), the amount of the base package (guaranteed minimum free services), approval of treatment algorithms, the definition of health care costs, streamlining logistics and human resources, and many other issues, without which the introduction of compulsory health insurance is not possible.

After the transition medical services should operate an integrated scheme of compulsory and voluntary health insurance. Everyone should be able to expand the basic package to include additional conditions in its coverage, as well as the choice of the number of private clinics. And this requires voluntary health insurance (VHI). Moreover, if CMI covers some of the basic services, the cost of the VHI policy can be reduced in this equivalent. And this, in turn, can increase the number of people willing and able to afford a voluntary health insurance. We know that today the number of people insured under this type does not exceed 1% of the population of the Republic. So the possibility of health insurance, to put it mildly, not only exhausted, but not developed as it should. - 17D-