One of the biggest challenges in managing social healthcare in Indonesia is low awareness and willingness of informal members to pay their premium contribution regularly. This condition was further worsened by the fact that in 2020, 91.3 million people were unbanked (have no bank accounts. Data source: Central Bank of Indonesia).
These conditions negatively impacted the collection rate for informal sector members of the Social Security Administering Body for the Health Sector (BPJS Kesehatan) of Indonesia. In 2019, the collection rate for informal members was just 64.58 percent.
Since low collections would adversely affect the financial sustainability of the programme, in April 2020, BPJS Kesehatan launched an initiative to auto-debit without a bank account to address the challenge. The initiative allowed the members to pay the premium regularly by auto-debit even if they had no bank accounts. They only need to access *141*999# or *141*222 from any mobile phone. It significantly increased the contribution rate of informal sector members by 9.70 per cent or an increase of more than 861.47 billion Indonesian rupiahs (IDR) in contributions.