The Experiences of Merging Health Insurance Funds in Turkey, Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia: What lessons can be learned?

Background : Fragmentation in health insurance system can obstruct reaching universal health coverage’ objectives and may lead to inequity in financial and organizational access to health care services. One possible option to overcome this challenge is merging the existing insurance funds together. This article aims to review the experience of Turkey, Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia regarding merging which can be very useful for other countries which are looking for ways of enhancing their health systems. Methods: The present study is a cross-country comparative analysis. The first criterion to choose these countries was with experience of the policy of merging. The second criterion was diversity in health insurance systems. To find the most relevant documents about the subject, different sources of information were searched including books, scientific papers, reports, policy documents and documents published by international organizations such as WHO and World Bank. We followed snowball sampling method to reach out for further documents by checking the reference list of the most relevant documents. We also contacted the authors with the most relevant articles in the selected countries to introduce and provide us with more articles or publications about the subject. Results: The experience of Turkey, Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia show that different reasons may force policy makers to move towards merging and reducing the number of health insurance funds; different stakeholders may support or oppose merging based on the interests they may have in the current fragmented health insurance system; various positive and negative consequences may occur in the health system as the result of merging. The experience of these countries also emphasize that in order to accelerate and facilitate implementation process of merger and face less operational challenges, there should be some prerequisites such as experiencing reliable economic growth to enhance benefit package and support the single national insurance scheme financially after merging. Conclusions: Merging is not the panacea to all problems of health system and other contributing health reforms should be implemented simultaneously or sequentially in other aspects of health system if merging is going to pave the way reaching universal health coverage.