Assessing progress in the national health financing system towards universal health coverage in Iran: a mixed-method study protocol

Table 1 The challenges of health financing system in Iran

Health financing challenges	References
Catastrophic costs	[16–19]
Low level of sustainability	[15, 20–22]
Deficit and expensive payment system, relied on fee-for-service	[15, 23–25]
Inadequate share of the public sector in total health expenditures	[16]
Fragmentation of revenue sources and pooling	[15, 23, 24, 26]
Low level of efficiency	[24]
Existence of informal payments	[27, 28]
Increased treatment costs	[16]
Ineffective strategic purchasing mechanisms	[15, 29, 30]
Insufficient redistribution of cross-subsidy between the insurance schemes	[15]
Differences between tariffs of public and private services	[16]
Poor transparency of financial flow	[23, 24]

ISSN: 1478-4505