Health-care financing and equity: Public insurance in Chile

This article sets out to examine the sources of health-care financing and their use, drawing on the health system accounts available in Chile; the role of public spending at the present time and its effect in reducing inequities in the Chilean system; and the distribution of health-care provision by income level in the population. Solidarity and equity seem to be peculiar to the public sector, although even there equity is found only in certain types of health-care provision. The article then goes on to analyse three public insurance (National Health Fund) programmes designed to reduce inequities in health-care access, which have acted as a test bed for the current Health Reform Plan in Chile; it reviews the central component of that reform, the Plan for Universal Access with Explicit Guarantees (Plan AUGE), which was approved in 2005 and has begun to be gradually applied; and it describes aspects of financial equity.