Managed Competition in the National Health Insurance System of Israel

How can we provide meaningful financial protection to people who are currently not served by health insurance markets (public or private)? This is the issue Bindu and her team at Dvara Health Finance have been working on for the past couple of years.

Managed competition is a theoretical concept for designing and regulating health insurance systems. Such systems can secure consumers' interests by managing diverging incentives, instituting uniform regulations, equipping consumers to make informed choices, and creating a competitive environment tailored to rewarding those organisations that improve services to consumers.

When viewed from a consumer’s perspective, these challenges manifest at different stages of their journey with a health insurance program, beginning from the decision to enrol in a program and ending at the renewal stage. While tweaks to the design of the health insurance program or moving to a more integrated model of healthcare provision may help in this blog post, we explore the role that social capital can play in circumventing some of these challenges.

Colombia’s healthcare domain, like many other sectors in the country, was completely overhauled as part of the country’s sweeping reforms that followed the adoption of a new Constitution in 1991.

In this study, we conduct a quantitative analysis of household finance data to understand the status of health insurance ownership in India, identify the determinants of health insurance ownership, and understand the relationship between households’ access to health insurance and their health expenditure.

In this paper, we characterise the National Health Insurance system of Israel, its universal public healthcare system, as one which has adopted managed competition and achieved remarkable outcomes. We place the establishment of the system in the country’s political-economic context to determine the role of the structural factors in shaping health policy in the country.