Health Financing in Chile: 2008

Abstract

Objective: to estimate the main components of aggregate health financing in Chile and the participation of both sectors of the health social security: FONASA (public) and Isapres (private). Method: accounting for revenues from social security health: general taxes, contributions and co-payments, official records were used. In the case of out-of-pocket expenditure, the amounts were estimated based on a Household Survey of 2007. This was a methodological innovation and improvement. Results: the financing of the social security system of health care in Chile reached 6.9% of GDP in 2008 and 7.4% of GDP when including also the armed forces and the Mutual System of Occupational Health Insurance. We highlight the low level of taxes among the financial sources and, on the contrary, the high proportion of out-of-pocket expenditure; also, that 2.4% of GDP funding is occupied by Isapres beneficiaries, i.e, by 16.5% of the population. Conclusions: Until recently, studies showed a significantly lower proportion of out-of-pocket spending. However, the use of household surveys allowed us to determine that this spending reaches an alarming 40% of social security financing of health. This fact is a bad result for Chile and shows that the country has failed to adequately address the problem of financial protection, probably because the instruments implemented in the latest reforms were not able to structurally modify the financing pattern.