Paper
Poverty Africa Health Programme - Health MicroInsurance: Notes from a Visit July 2002
How to create and operate a healthy health insurance portfolio?
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This paper introduces Poverty Africa as an international non-governmental organization (NGO) headquartered in Dar es Salaam. It has a holistic approach to development with multi-faceted interventions:
- Microfinance;
- Education;
- Nutrition;
- HIV/AIDS prevention;
- Healthcare microinsurance.
Poverty Africa has the following insurance products in its healthcare portfolio, with varying premiums, durations and coverage norms:
- Insurance against basic out-patient healthcare;
- Insurance against in- and out-patient care including simple surgeries and ambulance;
- Insurance against complicated surgeries.
Discussing the operations, marketing, risk assessment, products and accounting methods of Poverty Africa, the paper recommends the following lessons for creating a strong health insurance portfolio:
- Adopting a careful and comprehensive approach towards calculating premiums;
- Offering incentives for providers to help prevent fraud;
- Basing product price on conservative estimates of total number of customers;
- Preparing a marketing plan and providing training and incentives to insurance sales agents;
- Formalizing clear guidelines with funders;
- Conducting professional risk assessment.
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