BRATISLAVA, October 31, (WEBNOVINY) — The Cabinet of Robert Fico on Wednesday approved a project to create a system in Slovakia with a single public health insurance company. The project lists three ways to arrive at a single health insurance company from the current three, two of which are private. One is to take over into management the portfolio of clients of private health insurers, another is acquisition of shares or specified assets of private health insurers, and the third option is expropriation of private health insurance companies. Based on its analysis, the Health Ministry evaluated as the best method to arrive at a single health insurance company the transfer of shares of private health insurance companies.
„As the only one of the analyzed variants, this allows the state to acquire exclusive control over all constituents of a non-state health insurance company,“ said the ministry in the material. It also states that by acquiring full management control over private insurance companies, the state also receives control over litigation that these health insurance companies lead against the government.
The question of what is the value of private health insurance companies will be answered by an audit. If a private health insurance company will not agree with such audit, the government will be able to evaluate it without an audit, on the basis of incomplete information, as the Health Ministry’s material suggests. If acquisition fails, the government would proceed to expropriation. The whole process would then be finalized by so-called unitarization of the system, i.e., organizational and economic unification of all health insurance companies into one unit. This step should complete the first phase of transformation.
The entity that will represent the government in the whole process of changes will be either the state-run public health insurance company VsZP of a separately formed company established for the introduction of a unitary system of public health insurance to be created for this sole purpose.
In the initial stage of the transformation process, the Health Ministry assumes the adoption of a transformation law, which among other things, will determine the method of assessing the price of private insurance companies and outline the expropriation process. Then a reform bill would be passed for the new system of health insurance.
The legal form the unified health insurance company can vary, from a joint-stock company to a public institution. The Health Ministry states that it will not so much depend on the legal form rather than on the legal rules that will regulate the activities of the health insurance company and ensure that its authorities will manage its funds responsibly, efficiently, and under public scrutiny. In addition to public health insurance, the unified health insurance company could take over a part of the agenda of social security provider Socialna poistovna, as well as some of the tasks of the Health Care Supervision Office, whose position the new system will have to be reconsidered.
SITA