ABSTRACT
Health insurance is a concept whereby people pre-pay for coverage, and together pool the risks associated with the costs of falling ill. Amongst others, Ghana, Rwanda and Thailand have adopted forms of Social Health Insurance (SHI) to finance their health care systems, and still more governments such as the Kingdom of Lesotho have begun investigating the feasibility of starting these programmes in their countries. The social determinants of health (SDH) perspective has become a basic part of our underlying approach to research in many fields of study related to health, including serving as an important marker in the cultural turn from medical to health geography. The Government of Ghana enacted the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) into law in 2003, and the scheme was active nationwide within the next few years. The vast majority of the NHIS revenue comes from the centralised sources of funding, and premium payments only accounting for 5" of all NHIS inflow.
