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Owen Smith
Owen Smith is a Senior Economist with the World Bank’s Health, Nutrition and Population Global Practice, currently based in New Delhi, India. Since joining the World Bank in 2005, he has worked extensively on health financing and health policy issues in the Europe and Central Asia and South Asia regions. He is a co-author of Getting Better: Improving Health System Outcomes in Europe and Central Asia and Going Universal: How 24 Countries are Implementing Universal Health Coverage. Prior to joining the World Bank, he worked as a health economist at a consulting firm with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa and as a macroeconomist at the Canadian Department of Finance, with a focus on East Asia.
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Insuring India: PM-JAY’s targeting problem
India’s largest health insurance programme is targetted at poor and vulnerable populations who would be least able to afford medical care. However, this article by Chhabra and Smith shows that a large proportion of beneficiaries of both national and state health insurance schemes belong to the top half of the welfare distribution. They suggest using alternative eligibility criteria to increase awareness and uptake of schemes, as a path towards universal health coverage.
