Health financing lessons from Thailand for South Africa on the path towards universal health coverage

Abstract

Five years after the release of its Green Paper on National Health Insurance (NHI),years after the institution of NHI pilot sites and following the recent release of the White Pa 4 per on NHI, South Africa (SA) needs to move beyond the phase 1 plans of policy making and healthening activities to phase 2 – putting into place the legal and institutional frameth system strengworks and systems for implementation of its universal health coverage (UHC) system. In doing so, SA can draw on considerable practical lessons from other countries’ reforms in managing UHC with favourable equity outcomes over the past decade. We outline some potentially significant lessons from the Thai health financing system for SA.