Pathology of Health Insurance System in Iran

From a social point of view, insurance is an economic tool for reducing and eliminating risk factors via integrating a number of identical risks to predict the probable losses of a group as a whole. Social insurance is based on the belief that there are people in the community who face major risks that they cannot afford it lonely. The purpose of the Social Security Insurance Scheme is to distribute the income to those people who cannot deal with these risks. The principles governing social insurance are such that the failure to comply with any of its three principles, including social solidarity, cross subsidy, legal coercion, undermines the structure of this kind of insurance, and diverts society from the its goals that is “social justice”. Health insurance systems have completed three transition periods in their life history, based on the location of financial risk. Insurance is a trilateral relationship between the patient, the provider and the insurer. In historical systems: there is a direct relationship between the patient and the services provider and the location of the financial risk is the patient himself. In traditional systems: a person pays a sum to an insurance institution during the healthy life period and insures himself against the financial risk arising from it, and therefore the place of occurrence of the financial risk is the insurer. In modern systems: the place of financial risk is insurance company and the provider of services together, and it prevents the appearance of information asymmetry phenomena, moral hazard and induced demand. In conclusion, based on the documents and upstream laws, priority actions are being proposed to reform the insurance system.