Public insurance scheme

While the previous government failed to keep its promise to spend some parts of revenue generated from subsidy cuts to healthcare, the new government has already launched the Public Healthcare Plan initiatives. The initiative seeks to cover all people without health insurance. Their insurance premiums are said to be financed by subsidy cut's revenue. The overall goal of the plan is to fulfill the legal obligation to extend full health insurance coverage to all undertake and develop Referral System and Family Physician Initiative. It also aims at promoting health, regulating treatment behavior of people, physicians, medical-diagnostic institutions, reducing the burden of medical costs on people, reforming methods of payment to medical-diagnostic institutions and physicians, unifying basic insurance services and extending service coverage, promoting fair access to services and finance, preventing unnecessary hospitalization cases, reducing induced demands and directing health subsidies in an efficient manner.
In this year's budget law, healthcare share rose from 12% to 15% and 3000 billion tomans have been allocated to cover the poor and marginalized groups under insurance. 4800 billion tomans are also envisaged to be paid to the Ministry of Health out of the revenue generated from subsidy cuts.
The minister of health considers the aggregation of insurance schemes in order to offer integrated medical services inevitable and calls it the only solution to reform the healthcare system in the country. People should be granted a health ID card by which they can enjoy basic medical services from pharmacies, hospitals, dental clinics and laboratories.
Qualitative and quantitative development of insurance schemes is not ensured unless the integration happens faster. Currently, despite the significant number of insurance companies, the patients are underserved and discriminated to the point where they have to bear more than half of the cost of surgical operations, medicine and equipment. Masoud Pezeshkian, Healthcare Commission member of the parliament insisted the Ministry of Health to expedite the integration of medical insurance companies under one public insurance scheme and considered it the only way to give supplemental insurance a real function and promote quality insurance services.

Insurance penetration rate in Iran
Insurance penetration rate is defined as the ratio of the percentage of total insurance premiums to gross domestic product. It is measured by calculating generated insurance premiums in proportion to GDP. It indicates the level of development of insurance sector in a country. Higher rates indicate higher growth in the insurance sector. In Iran, the insurance penetration rate is approximately 1.8%, significantly below the global average of 7% in developed countries. According to the reports released by Sigma, the most well-known insurance journal in the world, England with 15.74% and Algeria with 0.5% rank first and last respectively in terms of insurance penetration rate.