Nepal, June 9 -- Nepal has long sought to expand access to essential health services and cut related financial burden on the poor and the middle class, with the ambitious goal of achieving universal health coverage by 2030. To this end, in 2017, the country introduced the National Health Insurance Programme (NHIP) under the Health Insurance Act. However, this ambition of universal coverage seems increasingly elusive given the persistent issues plaguing the NHIP, including structural weaknesses, weak governance and, most crucially, underfunding. The insurance programme has become so unpopular that the renewal rate has declined to around 50 percent.

The NHIP-targeted decisions over the past few months have only worsened its sorry state. In...