Social health insurance

Social health insurance is a method for financing health care costs through the collection of funds contributed by individuals, employers, and sometimes government subsidies. It is one of the five main ways that health care systems are funded.

Social health insurance systems are characterized by the presence of sickness funds which usually receive a proportional contribution of their members' wages. With this insurance contributions these funds generally pay part medical costs of their members, to the extent that the services are included in the, sometimes nationally defined, benefit package. Otto von Bismarck was the first to make social health insurance mandatory on a national scale (in Germany), but social health insurance was already common for many centuries before among guilds mainly in continental Europe.