Equity aspects of the National Health Insurance Scheme in Ghana: Who is enrolling, who is not and why?

Do Inequalities in Health Care Utilization in Developing Countries Change When We Take into Account Traditional Medicines?

“…Similar policies have been implemented in Mozambique, (Lindelow, 2005) Zambia and Uganda (from Asante, Zwi, & Ho, 2006), [see (Gilson et al, 2001) for financing in developing countries], whilst the Ministry of Health in Zambia uses deprivation based resource allocation formula (Chitah & Masiye, 2007). It is also an important policy goal in Ghana, where the Ministry of Health tries to ensure adequate allocation of resources by identifying those most in need (Jehu-Appiah, Baltussen, Lauer, & Koolman, 2007;Jehu-Appiah, et al, 2011;Ministry of Health, 2007).…”

Determinants of enrolment in the NHIS for women in Ghana – a cross sectional study

“…It has been found that certain groups of persons, especially the poor are systematically excluded from the NHIS [11][12][13][14]. Women have been noted to face greater difficulties in accessing adequate care.…”

Health insurance and access to health care services in developing countries

“…Some evaluation studies (Peters et al, 2008, Jehu-Appiah et al, 2011, Whitehead et al, 2001, Wagstaff, 2002, suggest that the peculiar needs of the poor have for a long time been ignored in the design of so-called pro poor health insurance schemes and as such the barriers that hinder poor households' access to care still remain. To explore these barriers of access to health care an integrated conceptual framework for assessing accessto health care is required to inform the design of these schemes.…”

“…have been implementing various forms health insurance schemes in recent times with the objective of ensuring that the poor in ing of users' preferences and perceptions and incorporating these into the design of health insurance schemes may increase enrolment rates, thus ensuring the poor have improved access to care (Arhinful, 2003, De Allegri et al, 2009. Jehu-Appiah et al (2011) andCarin (2003) provide usefulconceptual models for analysing enrolment outcomes yet because enrolment does not necessarily guarantee access to health care, as Jost(2008) observe in the case of the United States where many poor people enrolled in a scheme and did not have access to medical care. Besides, these models have failed to address the idea of integrating traditional medicine into the health systems in developing countries to make health care acceptable and inclusive for users who either by habit or circumstances do not access allopathic medicine.…”