Egypt is rebuilding its health system around a plan to cover every citizen, The Egyptian Gazette reported, and is leaning on foreign lenders and its own budget to pay for it. At its centre sits the Universal Health Insurance System, a phased scheme backed by the World Bank, the French Development Agency and Japan’s International Co-operation Agency, known as JICA.
That effort is a domestic one first, the paper said, aimed at widening access and lifting the standard of care for Egyptians rather than at courting foreign patients. Egypt has run the programme through presidential directives and a run of structural reforms since 2014.
One Health and the outside world
Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, the health minister, took Egypt’s case abroad at the One Health Summit in Lyon, held under France’s G7 presidency and timed to World Health Day. The summit was the first of its kind to bring heads of state and government together with scientists, parliamentarians, civil society and the private sector, the paper said. Abdel Ghaffar called it a “vital platform to accelerate the global implementation of the One Health approach”. One Health ties human, animal and environmental health together, and it targets antimicrobial resistance and zoonotic disease, the sort that jumps from animals to people.
What Egypt has already done
Since 2014 the government has run a string of public health drives, the paper said, going after hepatitis C, non-communicable disease, maternal and child health and early cancer detection. The stand-out is the “100 Million Healthy Lives” campaign, which the paper said made Egypt the first country to wipe out hepatitis C as a serious public health threat. Screening has since widened to cover diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity. Alongside the campaigns, Egypt has poured money into its hospitals, upgrading hundreds of them and their primary care units, buying modern equipment and training staff, with a push into the rural areas that had least.
The insurance rollout
The Universal Health Insurance System started in 2018, The Egyptian Gazette reported. It has so far reached 5.1 million citizens across six governorates: Port Said, Luxor, Ismailia, South Sinai, Suez and Aswan. That first phase cost LE51 billion between 2018 and 2025. A second phase is set to add five more governorates, namely Damietta, Marsa Matrouh, Kafr El-Sheikh, North Sinai and Minya. It would bring in about 12.4 million people, served by 69 hospitals and 669 primary care units, at a cost the paper put at LE115 billion. In full, the scheme is meant to cover the whole country by 2030, two years earlier than the original 2032 date, and to cost more than LE360 billion.
Going digital
Egypt is also moving its health records online under a National Digital Health Strategy running from 2025 to 2029, the paper said. The aim is to pool health data, give every citizen an electronic medical record, and cut waiting times by as much as 60 per cent. The strategy also widens telemedicine, adds AI to diagnosis and reaches rural patients. Abdel Ghaffar said it would help by “supporting data-driven decision-making” and easing access to digital services. Hassan Tawfik, a former chairman of Benha Health Insurance Hospital, told The Egyptian Gazette that the recent progress was real, “particularly in preventive care and disease control”, and that electronic records and telemedicine would lift both efficiency and patient outcomes.
What it means for medical tourism
None of this is a medical tourism plan, and the paper does not sell it as one. These reforms are aimed at Egyptian patients and paid for out of the state budget and foreign loans, and the paper gives no figure for foreign arrivals or foreign revenue. Its medical tourism angle is a second-order one. A country that lifts the baseline of its hospitals, trains more staff and puts records online builds the same capacity that a paying foreign patient later checks for, which is the ground on which Egypt has separately pushed quality reforms at its hospitals and reported revenue up 76.67 per cent.
Capacity, not yet delivery
A funded plan is not the same as a delivered one, and Egypt’s is part built. Egypt’s 5.1 million citizens already covered, and the LE51 billion already spent, are results on the record. Nationwide coverage by 2030, the 12.4 million people in the second phase and the LE360 billion total are commitments still to be met. That is the line between capacity and announcement, and it is where this story will be tested.
The checkable dates are Egypt’s own. Whether the second phase signs up its 12.4 million people across five more governorates, whether the 2030 nationwide target holds two years ahead of the old 2032 deadline, and whether the digital strategy actually cuts waiting times toward the promised 60 per cent will show whether the reform is landing. Only after those numbers arrive does the medical tourism case built on top of them have anything solid under it.