HEALTH INSURANCE SYSTEM IN SERBIA – QUALITY, REFORM, FINANCIAL SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract

Constrained by difficult economic situation, the health system in Serbia is facing a great challenge, and in order to overcome it and handle the gap between possibilities and expectations, it is necessary to implement economic reform of health care sector in Serbia, i.e. its decentralization, which implies improvements in providing health services while trying to find a model of financial sustainability of health care system in Serbia. One of the most essential impulses of society to its economic and general social development is the health of its population. In fact, in addition to being a social potential, health is to be considered as an economic potential of a country as well. The need to examine health from economic point of view, as well as in the sense of sustainable economic development, is gaining in presence in the newly made circumstances of an advancing economic crisis. There is an evident gap in the social community between the expectations of health care beneficiaries who are used to high-quality services with considerably subsidized health care and the new situation where health care institutions dispose of no funds to ensure the necessary prerequisites for providing health care, with an obvious weakening of social interlinkage and a fading trust in health care institutions. Any change in terms of scope, quality and prices of health care may and does runs into the wall of disapproval, even judgment; therefore, it is necessary to regulate and legally define health care quality standards in the health system of Serbia and thus precisely determine the quality of service provided and, at the same time, manner of payment, i.e. responsibility for the costs incurred. In order to reach a financially sustainable health care system in Serbia, it is necessary to analyze different models of funding, implement rationalization and reorganization of methods of funding and reexamine the health insurance models in Serbia. The priority concerning the health system financing is the selection of the most adequate method of raising sufficient funds. There are numerous factors which will determine our choice of a particular model of health care system funding in Serbia, among which the following are most important: degree of socio-economic development of the country, fiscal capacity of the country, methods and efficiency of fund raising, support from the political system in its feasibility.