Response to: Letter to the Editor "Universal Health Coverage in Iran: where we stand and how we can move forward"

We thank Joulaei et al (1) for their insightful comments on our paper on Universal Health Coverage in Iran (2). They criticized some parts of Iran's Health Transformation Plan (HTP), and we do not disagree with some of their comments on HTP. However, we think that an evidencebased approach is needed for an in-depth analysis of HTP, which is beyond our correspondence and Joulaei et al.’s comments. Therefore, we only focus on the criticisms made to our correspondence which was related to the starting point of HTP as to whether public hospitals were an appropriate starting point or whether the primary health care (PHC) should have been the starting point for HTP....