This book details community-based approaches to insuring people against medical risk not based on individual risk rating as in private insurance, but rather using decentralized social insurance based on the average risk. This book shows how the concept of social insurance can be implemented in countries that do not have the capacity to finance or organize large-scale systems. It also details the strategies and public policies that countries can use to mitigate the shortcomings of community-financing plans designed along the lines of micro-insurance. Reinsurance is stressed as a tool for enlarging the risk pool and spreading risks across larger population groups, which no single micro-insurance scheme can do on its own. Social reinsurance also discusses other measures to strengthen micro-insurance-based community-financing programs.
