Cent Eur J Public Health 2015, 23(1):3-7 | DOI: 10.21101/cejph.a4027

Healthcare System Financing and Profits: All That Glitters is Not Gold

Tomáš Zelený1,2, Vladimír Bencko1
1 Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, 1st Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
2 Institute of Economic Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

The objective of this paper is an analysis of two main attributes of healthcare systems. First of the main attributes is the trend of ever growing expenditures of healthcare systems all across the world. Second attribute is the efficiency of chosen mixed healthcare systems, where mixed system is one which features involvement of both private and public sector. Countries chosen for analysis are USA as the country with high private sector influence on healthcare, France with its mediocre influence and Japan, where the private companies participate in health care but are very strictly regulated by a zero profit rule, and the Czech Republic, where public sector dominates the health care. The result is that the systems with higher influence of the private sector tend to have lesser occupancy, not significantly better performance and higher expenditures. This raise doubts whether the private sector brings anything of value for the patients within the healthcare system. However, more detailed analysis should be carried out to confirm or refuse this hypothesis.

Keywords: healthcare financing, public and private sectors, long term perspective analysis, cross country comparison

Received: March 13, 2014; Revised: October 27, 2014; Accepted: October 27, 2014; Published: March 1, 2015  Show citation

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Zelený T, Bencko V. Healthcare System Financing and Profits: All That Glitters is Not Gold. Cent Eur J Public Health. 2015;23(1):3-7. doi: 10.21101/cejph.a4027. PubMed PMID: 26036091.
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