Maria Health-Intellicare partnership looks to minimize out-of-pocket health spending in the country

MANILA, Philippines, 13 September 2019 – Maria Health, the first health aggregator in the Philippines, officially announced its partnership with Intellicare, the country’s leading managed care provider, in a contract signing event held at the latter’s head office.

The partnership with Maria Health marks both company’s commitment to investing in innovative solutions to make healthcare accessible and affordable. For a country with a population nearing 105 million, it’s been difficult to scale access to the market through traditional methods of sales and distribution.

Maria Health, as a direct-to-consumer channel, enables Intellicare to tap captive audience comprised of micro, small, and medium  enterprises (MSME), as well as, the 22 million households in the country, ranging from individuals to families – segments in society that need insurance the most.

This collaboration also allow Intellicare access to digital data and marketing capabilities to drive qualified leads, transactions, and tools that can manage the customer life cycle seamlessly. Doing so makes it extremely efficient to service the uninsured through technology.

“We estimate that over half a million Filipinos today are searching online for HMOs and healthcare services, signaling where future customers are coming from,” said Vincent Lau, CEO of Maria Health.

Intellicare and Maria Health put their missions of making quality health care accessible to more Filipinos the simple, fast, and easy way into action.

The partnership looks to reduce the health insurance gap in the country and minimize the out-of-pocket health expenses of Filipino households.

The Philippines faces an underinsurance gap of P373 billion fueled by consumer out-of-pocket spending. With health expenses reportedly growing each year at an average rate of 8 percent, it’s going to get much harder for a large number of Filipino households to have access to healthcare.

According to reports, of the 2017 total health expenditure, 20 percent was covered by the national and local government; 17 percent was covered by social health insurance agencies; 5 percent was covered by HMOs; 2 percent by private insurance; 2 percent by others; and a whopping 56.3 percent was paid for by the patients themselves, or as out-of-pocket expenses.

Demand for private insurance grew 40% from 2016 to 2017.

It’s been estimated that every year, over 1.5 million families are pushed to poverty because of their reliance on shouldering their own healthcare.