Wall Street Journal examines program in Pakistan looking to provide health insurance for poor urban residents

The Wall Street Journal examines how "some local social entrepreneurs are coming up with new ideas to provide the poor with access to better medical services" in Pakistan, where the health care system is "split between low-cost government-funded hospitals offering basic services and expensive private-sector medical institutions ... [b]ut the majority of the country's 190 million people have little access to health care." The newspaper describes how one program, called Naya Jeevan -- "a non-profit micro-insurance program for the urban poor" that "offers an insurance program at subsidized rates under a national group health-insurance model" -- operates to help ensure affordable medical care for the poor and how it has come "under scrutiny from the country's insurance regulator" (Bahree, 11/6).