Pros And Cons Of National Health Insurance

Title: National Health Insurance-The pros and cons National Health Insurance (NHI) is a legally enforced scheme of health insurance to make sure that all the citizen are provided with essential health care services regardless of their employment status and their ability to contribute monetary benefits to the NHI fund. The funding mechanism and policy of NHI is different from country to county. The country that practice this National Health Insurances scheme including Japan, Australia, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea and others. In Malaysia, the government has recently proposed “1 care for 1 Malaysia” to reform the health care system by replacing the existing tax-based funded system with a mandatory social health insurance scheme. The purpose

Healthcare belongs to human right, according to WHO, a healthy person is the one who is physically, mentally and socially. Because of this, most of the countries across the word provide universal access to the health care services for their citizen. Every citizen have the right to access to the health care system no matter they are poor or rich according to the NHI scheme. The social health insurance in Malaysia proposed that the young, rich and healthy people will support the old, poor and sick people. Inequity of health access often occur in among legal and illegal immigrants, age group such as young and old people, geographical area especially rural areas and states such as in East Malaysia where there is less health care system available in certain rural areas. For example, there is always this scenario where the poor people seek for treatment in public hospital where the rich people will tend to access more to the private hospital because they would not want to wait for the queue in hospital. With the long waiting list in public hospital, sometime the treatable condition are not being treated on time and preventable disease are not prevented resulting in the death of patient. By implementing the NHI scheme, I believe the equity in health can be achieved regardless of poor and rich, they are able to access to both public and private

The implementation of NHI might affect those who has existing insurance. Those who already have health coverage are satisfied with the existing system. They afraid it will affect the health coverage such as having less assess to the health care services if any changes to the system occurred. For those who afford to buy private medical insurance, they still have to participate in the NHI. The criteria of participating in NHI as contributor and as a patient has been made clearly to avoid any confusion. For those who earn above certain level, they need to contribute to the NHI fund by law. This means that if a person already purchase the private medical scheme, he or she would have to pay for both the private medical scheme as well as the NHI. In addition, the presence of NHI might affect the insurance company in the country where there will be a loss of income for insurance agent who sell the medical insurance