Equity of Access to Essential Dental Services: A Case Study from Indonesia with Lessons for Achieving Universal Health Coverage

Abstract Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) by the year 2030 is a major goal in global health. Recently, there has been an increasing recognition that dental care should be an integral part of national UHC insurance schemes. The recommendations from international groups such as WHO and the World Bank are that UHC for dental health care services should follow the general recommended model for UHC: Defining an essential package of health care services primarily by cost-effectiveness criteria that is gradually expanded over time. In this article, we show that countries such as Thailand and Indonesia, which have formal UHC, nevertheless still have persistent barriers of access and inequalities. In this article, we argue, by using Indonesia as a case study, that governments should, after they have provided a formal right to an extensive range of health care services to everyone, constantly identify gaps in coverage, and then systematically remove those gaps, not by attempting to identify additional interventions to be covered, but by focusing on how feasible the interventions are at increasing access to population groups that currently lack access, and by demonstrating that over time their policies with reduce inequality between groups.