BPJS

May 10, 2020

Indonesia has great data on COVID. Does anyone want to look at it?

For months, Indonesia’s “pray-for-prevention” Health Minister and “virus-free-vaccation” President pretended that the country was shielded by some miraculous force-field from the pandemic that was consuming much of the world. For months, most thinking people in Indonesia and elsewhere have know that was absolute nonsense. The country was able to maintain its claims that it had virtually no [confirmed!] cases because it was doing virtually no testing. A few people, including Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan, was more realistic about the dangers,…

October 25, 2016

Health insurance Etc.: Indonesia’s improbable success

Since its very inception, Indonesia has been given to committing itself to unlikely projects with virtually no preparation. Nationhood, for example (1945). Rice self-sufficiency (1970). Dramatic decentralisation (1999). Most recently, in 2014, universal health coverage. By 2019, it was summarily declared, all Indonesians would be included in a single national health insurance scheme. All of these grandiose declarations were greeted with howls of scepticism from colonisers or so-called development partners; there was a great deal of “they’ll-never-do-it-without-us” thigh-slapping/hand-wringing. Each spectacularly…