Senior policy-makers took the view that in practice universality was likely to mean
a tax-financed scheme: if politicians wanted to reach universal coverage as
quickly as promised, using general tax revenues was the only choice. Collecting
premiums from scheme members would have involved technical complications,
and was also politically unpalatable.
The advent of the UCS greatly simplified the budget allocation process: the total
UCS budget equals the capitation rate multiplied by the total number of UCS
members in that budget year. Table 2 below shows details of how the capitation