Back ground: Social Health Insurance improves access to health services among civil servants by removing catastrophic health expenditure. In Ethiopia, only 7.3% of the population covered by health insurance. Due to this fact the government of Ethiopia initiated Social Health Insurance scheme to be applied in the formal employers and employees with compulsory membership of the scheme. This study therefore aimed to assess willingness to join and pay for social health insurance scheme among

more »

... ent and private employees in Debere Berhan Town, Ethiopia . Methods: Cross-sectional study was conducted .At mean time Stratified sampling technique was used to select 619 employees. A modified dichotomous contingent valuation method (CVM) was applied to elicit employees' willingness to pay. Bi-variant and multivariable logistic regression analysis was done . Then the result at 95% CI and P value <0.05 was declared as variables have statistically significant association. Results: A total of 619 employees with response rate of 97.8% were participated in the study. About 406 (65%) of the respondents were willing to join to Social Health Insurance scheme. Of which 113 (27.8%) of employees were willing to pay the government proposed 3% premium. The employee's average willingness to pay for social health insurance scheme was 1.88% of their monthly salary. In this study the odds of respondents who had degree and above (AOR=3.608, 95%CI 1.177-11.061), employees good perception on quality health service (AOR=3.150, 95% CI 1.140-8.699) and employees who perceive benefit packages of social health insurance as enough (AOR=5.229, 95%CI: 2.230-12 .594) were higher than the counter parts. Conclusion: Employees willingness to join of the Social Health Insurance scheme(SHIS) is low and very low number of employees agree to pay the government proposed premium for SHIS. So decision-makers should emphasize to revise the benefit packages and the ** statistically significant at P-Value <= 0.01, and *<=0.05