Financing Health Care: What Can we Learn from CEE Experience?
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Administrative Culture |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | http://halduskultuur.eu/journal/index.php/HKAC/index |
| Field | Management and administrative |
| Keywords | health-care; Central and Eastern Europe; reforms; access; health finance |
| Description | Our paper is based on four country samples – Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia. All these countries are new EU member states, where the (official) goal of the health-finance system is to guarantee universal and equal access to health services. In the first part the country studies describe the evolution of new health-finance systems in selected countries as well as the pros and cons of national solutions. The core part of this paper discusses two important health-financing issues – the decision about how to fund health services and particularly the decision about the relations of public and private funding of health care. We propose two core conclusions: first, because the mode of financing does not have a clear impact on outcomes of the health-care system, the decisions of CEE countries to switch from general taxation to social-insurance systems are based mainly on political rationality; second, introducing pluralistic social health insurance during early phases of transition is too risky. |
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