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BPJS to provide uniform universal health care by 2024
BPJS Kesehatan is seeking to gradually phase out its prevailing three-tiered National Health Insurance hospitalization classes and provide an equitable health service system for all policyholders by 2024, two years later than planned.
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A nurse takes the blood pressure of a woman on Wednesday at Puskesmas Citeureup in Bogor regency, West Java, in 2020. (JP/P.J. Leo)
T
he state-owned Health Care and Social Security Agency (BPJS Kesehatan) is seeking to gradually phase out its prevailing three-tiered National Health Insurance (JKN) hospitalization classes and provide an equitable health service system for all policyholders by 2024, two years later than planned.
The government has been planning to eliminate service classes for the JKN program since 2020, through Presidential Regulation (Perpres) No. 82/2018 on health insurance issued by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.
The regulation mandated BPJS Kesehatan to provide one standardized basic service for all JKN policyholders by 2022 in a bid to ensure deficit-stricken program’s sustainability and to make sure that it could provide basic health care for all eligible Indonesians.
For a large part of its eight year existence, the BPJS Kesehatan has been suffering from massive deficits. In 2019 for example, the state-owned insurers lost Rp 51 trillion while in 2020 it lost some Rp 5.69 trillion (US$380 million).
This deficit was reversed only last year, after Jokowi increased the premiums for the JKN program and as people avoided going to health facilities for fear of contracting COVID-19.
Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said the government needed more time to ensure that all hospitals in the country were ready to implement a standardized basic service based on 12 indicators set by the National Social Security Council (DJSN).
"Out of 784 private and government-owned hospitals that we've recently surveyed, around 25 percent need major renovations and some 30 percent need minor refurbishment to implement the new standardized system," Budi said at a meeting with House of Representatives Commission IX overseeing health care and manpower on Monday.
