ABSTRACT
No one questions that Korea’s national health insurance performance has been truly phenomenal by the standard of time taken to achieve universal health insurance. The planning, adoption, and implementation of Korea’s various health policy measures within a short period have been so impressive that many analysts have attempted to identify the secrets of Korea’s success: whether government officials were wise and did the right things or whether Korea just got lucky. The strengths of Korea’s health insurance system have been acknowledged in international evaluations. A recently conducted international comparison of national health systems by Conn Hamilton (2006, 26) ranked Korea’s health system as fifth out of twenty-four major OECD countries. Korea’s National Health Insurance Corporation has shared its knowledge and information on Korea’s experiences through an international training program for the last five years. (In 2013, the agency changed its name to the National Health Insurance Service; this chapter uses the name NHIC throughout to refer to the organization.) In this program, 235 representatives from ninety-five developing countries were introduced to the Korean
health insurance system; from 2005 to 2009, 498 guests from fifty-four countries also visited the NHIC to learn about the system (NHIC 2011).
