IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v48y1999i7p913-923.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The social security scheme in Thailand: what lessons can be drawn?

Author

Listed:
  • Tangcharoensathien, Viroj
  • Supachutikul, Anuwat
  • Lertiendumrong, Jongkol

Abstract

The Social Security Scheme was launched in 1990, covering formal sector private employees for non-work related sickness, maternity and invalidity including cash benefits and funeral grants. The scheme is financed by tripartite contributions from government, employers and employees, each of 1.5% of payroll (total of 4.5%). The scheme decided to pay health care providers, whether public or private, on a flat rate capitation basis to cover both ambulatory and inpatient care. Registration of the insured with a contractor hospital was a necessary consequence of the chosen capitation payment system. The aim of this paper is to review the operation of the scheme, and to explore the implications of capitation payment and registration for utilisation levels and provider behaviour. A key weakness of the scheme's design is suggested to be the initial decision to give employers not employees the responsibility for choosing the registered hospitals. This was done for administrative reasons, but it contributed to low levels of use of the contractor hospitals. In addition, low levels of use were also probably the result of the potential for cream skimming, cost shifting from inpatient to ambulatory care and under-provision of patient care, though since monitoring mechanisms by the Social Security Office were weak, these effects are difficult to detect conclusively. Mechanisms to improve utilisation levels were gradually introduced, such as employee choice of registered hospitals and the formation of sub-contractor networks to improve access to care. A beneficial effect of the capitation payment system was that the Social Security Fund generated substantial reserves and expenditures on sickness benefits were well stabilised. The paper ends by recommending that future policy amendments should be guided by research and empirical findings and that tougher monitoring and enforcement of quality of care standards are required.

Suggested Citation

  • Tangcharoensathien, Viroj & Supachutikul, Anuwat & Lertiendumrong, Jongkol, 1999. "The social security scheme in Thailand: what lessons can be drawn?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 48(7), pages 913-923, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:48:y:1999:i:7:p:913-923
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(98)00392-X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pannarunothai, Supasit & Patmasiriwat, Direk & Srithamrongsawat, Samrit, 2004. "Universal health coverage in Thailand: ideas for reform and policy struggling," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 17-30, April.
    2. Fernando Ruiz & Liliana Amaya & Stella Venegas, 2007. "Progressive segmented health insurance: Colombian health reform and access to health services," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 16(1), pages 3-18, January.
    3. Thoresen, Stian H. & Fielding, Angela, 2011. "Universal health care in Thailand: Concerns among the health care workforce," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 99(1), pages 17-22, January.
    4. Mills, Anne & Bennett, Sara & Siriwanarangsun, Porntep & Tangcharoensathien, Viroj, 2000. "The response of providers to capitation payment: a case-study from Thailand," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 163-180, April.
    5. Mukhopadhaya, Pundarik, 2002. "Crisis, Social Sector And Income Distribution In Some Southeast Asian Countries," EIJS Working Paper Series 161, Stockholm School of Economics, The European Institute of Japanese Studies.
    6. Devadasan, Narayanan & Ranson, Kent & Van Damme, Wim & Acharya, Akash & Criel, Bart, 2006. "The landscape of community health insurance in India: An overview based on 10 case studies," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 78(2-3), pages 224-234, October.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:48:y:1999:i:7:p:913-923. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.