Equity of access under Korean universal health insurance

This study examined the extent to which equity in the use of physician services has been achieved in the Republic of Korea. Descriptive and logistic regression analysis was performed examining the relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variables and the relative importance of factors. The results indicate that a universal health insurance system has not yielded a fully equitable distribution of services. Access differences arise from coverage limitation, as well as urban/rural variations in the distributions of providers. The policy options for expansion of coverage should be encouraged to ease the financial burden of out-of-pocket payments on patients and to limit the range of noninsured services. Urban/rural variations in the distributions of providers are caused by the government's "laissez-faire" policy for the private medical sector. To solve this geographic misdistribution, the attention of policy makers is required, with changing of the government's "laissez-faire" policy.