Achieving effective universal health coverage with equity: Evidence from Chile

Abstract

© The Author 2013; all rights reserved.Chile's 'health guarantees' approach to providing universal and equitable coverage for quality healthcare in a dual public-private health system has generated global interest. The programme, called AUGE, defines legally enforceable rights to explicit healthcare benefits for priority health conditions, which incrementally covered 56 problems representing 75% of the disease burden between 2005 and 2009. It was accompanied by other health reform measures to increase public financing and public sector planning to secure the guarantees nationwide, as well as the state's stewardship role. We analysed data from household surveys conducted before and after the AUGE reform to estimate changes in levels of unmet health need, defined as the lack of a healthcare visit for a health problem occurring in the last 30 days, by age, sex, income, education, health insurance, residence and ethnicity; fitting logistic regression models and using predictive margins. Th