Chile - Health Insurance Issues : Old Age and Catastrophic Health Costs
The study offers an analytic approach to fundamental questions concerning the effect of the aging population on the Chilean health system, and, to the prospects for, and the extent of financing health care for the elderly, as presumably catastrophic costs are linked to this effect. However, the study reveals that catastrophic care is not a problem primarily affecting the elderly, since interventions show that, rather the highest costly episodes occur among infants. It is specified that technological change introduced the possibility of delivering care, at very high cost, to infants who would otherwise die, or suffer congenital disorders, and it is this change which shaped the current age distribution of catastrophic care. Under the country's health insurance system, the largest group is covered by the public system, while a smaller group is privately insured. However, the study reveals that significant numbers of catastrophic infant events are assisted in public facilities, regardless of patient's affiliation. This implies that apparently the public system does assume disproportionate catastrophic burdens, where the elderly are neither the sole, nor most substantial drain on public resources, suggesting private insurance could attract the stable, elderly population, and thus mitigate the financial conditions of the public health system.