Health Reform Scheme: Necessity, Challenges and Perspectives

Despite giving special emphasize on health, the planning programs of Iran have not been able to achieve their objectives. Evaluating the planning performancein this regards, we see that there is a high gap between plan objectives and their performance. These difference are especially more pronounced in the later years of the previous government. These divergence from the earlier normal years proved futile. Therefore, the only alternative is we believe to return to previous health scheme as operated on or before 1384(2005).The experience of its functioning proved to be appropriate .Thus return to previous scheme seems to be unavoidable. Adopting a Health Reform Scheme with mentioned objectives is a good indicator of government attention to seriousness to bring reform to the to health sector. This paper is an illustrative attempt to examine the necessity of this sort of schemes in the country and explain the challenges overhead and its perspectives. For this purpose we shall discuss success and failures of various development plans on health and evaluate their effectiveness. If our proposal for returning to earlier scheme is adopted then we shall have to understand its strength and weakness and try to eliminate the weakness and strengthen its positive aspects. The previous health scheme followed a sound policies in the beginning and had a positive impact on almost all heath indices. However, later on due to mismanagement of resources, increase in medical tariffs and decline in cash revenues in hospitals and clinical services, it was confronted with many challenges leading to poor performance in this regards. Recognizing the challenges and opportunities on the way help authorities and planners to design a better health reform scheme and to be able to better overcome the hindrances and facilitating the easier accessibilities of general public to health and clinical services.