TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Govt claims progress in health care
The government has claimed an increase in free health care coverage for low-income Indonesians in 2010, despite problems related to its implementation and ever-increasing health care costs
Change Size
T
he government has claimed an increase in free health care coverage for low-income Indonesians in 2010, despite problems related to its implementation and ever-increasing health care costs.
The Health Ministry said Friday that more than 56 percent, or around 42 million, of the estimated 76.4 million people living in poverty in the country had access to some forms of health care, including the government-sponsored health insurance scheme, Jamkesmas.
“If we break down the data further, as of June 2010, of those 42 million people, about 57.8 percent of them have been covered by Jamkesmas,” said Usman Sumantri, Health Ministry finance and Jamkesmas head.
Under the scheme, first launched in 2008, the ministry is targeting to cover the needs of free health services for the total population of low-income people in Indonesia, saying that progress was underway despite limited budget.
In 2010, the government allocated Rp 5.1 trillion (US$571.2 million) from its state budget to Jamkesmas, a slight increase from Rp 4.6 trillion in 2009. As for 2010, the ministry had disbursed Rp 3.8 trillion for the scheme, including Rp 1 trillion for financing 8,000 community health centers across the archipelago.
Usman said the rest of the budget allocation would soon be disbursed to finance mostly health costs of patients. He added that the Jamkesmas scheme covered 101.5 million health care visits in 2009, an 8.5 million increase in visits from 93 million recorded in 2008.
“Those visits, however, included only outpatient cases. As for inpatients, we measured them based on the total number of days patients spent in hospital,” he said.
The ministry reported the inpatients spent a total of 6.8 million days of treatment in hospitals in 2009 under the scheme, with an average health cost of Rp 332,000 for each patient every day. Between Jan. and July 2010, the total number of treatment days for Jamkesmas patients reached 4.6 million.
Usman said the ministry was planning to increase its budget allocation for Jamkesmas to Rp 5.6 trillion next year, but he described that the proposed amount would still be far from the ideal Rp 10.7 trillion needed to improve Jamkesmas programs.
“We’re predicting there will be an obstacle due to our limited budget, as health costs in general are increasingly expensive. Therefore, in order to overcome this constraint, we will make some adjustments,” Usman added.
Constraints in Jamkesmas are related not only to budgetary problems, but also its implementation, as many low-income people are complaining about difficulty accessing the scheme.
Usman said the new Jamkesmas system no longer allowed extortion practices to continue because local regents handled Jamkesmas registrations through a quota mechanism. “They issue a letter of decision detailing the number of people living in poverty, their names and other relevant data to determine who deserves to be insured,” he said. (tsy)
