One of the key responsibilities of a modern nation state is to protect and promote the health and wellbeing of its citizens. The papers presented in this double panel engage with ongoing health transformations and the extent to which health equity is and can be achieved within a country with extraordinary geographical, cultural and economic diversity. This theme is timely because it is now a decade since the introduction of Jaminan Kesehaten Indonesian (JKN), which represented a legion investment towards achieving equity in access to universal health care for Indonesians. The panel papers consider how a range of populations and actors are still experiencing health inequities and how these disparities are intrinsically linked with other forms of social and economic inequity, as well as exploring differences in the accessibility of health services for marginalised populations. The presenters in this panel also examine how policy guiding health transitions moving forward needs to be explicitly engaged with improving health equity and provide insights into how this can be achieved in different locations and at different scales from national, provincial and community level perspectives.