With an assured income, the insurers have no incentive whatever to impose cost-saving
behavior on the providers. Moreover, they also have an incentive to collude or make
agreements with the providers to increase the volume of services in order to increase
their profits. As long as the insurance companies do not behave as real risk-bearing
institutions, without assured profits, the potential benefits of increased provider
efficiency will be lost.
This discussion has focused on insurance companies, however it is equally valid for the
case of the territorial OMS branches, which, since they are part of the mandatory health
insurance system, will clearly have no incentives to behave as risk-bearing institutions.
According to the legislation the consumer is free to choose the insurer, thus in effect
also choosing the insurer’s contracted provider. This freedom of choice is important not
only as a key to increased consumer satisfaction, but also as a spur to insurer and
provider competition. In practice, however, consumer freedom of choice is constrained
by the limited availability of insurers in many of the regions. Even where there are many
insurers, division of the population into “sectors” or “spheres of influence” of insurance
companies in effect precludes consumer choice. In these situations, freedom of choice
in effect means little more than freedom to choose a physician within a polyclinic. Under
an incentive system which rewarded doctors for the quality of services rendered or for
their workload, even this choice should have some positive impact on service quality.
However, as doctors continue to be paid by salary for the most part, their only reward
for being preferred by patients is an increased workload with no corresponding financial
remuneration. Therefore any potential benefits of increased competition due to free
consumer choice are lost.
Implementation of the health insurance law has met with numerous obstacles. The law
has in fact been only partially implemented, and there are very broad interregional
variations in the financing patterns that have emerged. The competitive, market-based
model has failed to emerge except in isolated instances, and the expected increase in
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financial resources and improvements in efficiency was not as great as had been
hoped. There are ongoing discussions about the future role of the insurance carriers.
There is a growing tendency to view them as wasteful bureaucratic agencies that rather
impede efficiency in the new financing mechanism, and some regions have gone so far
as to have got rid of them altogether.
8
Ultimately, the objective of the new insurance system to increase overall funding for
health care has not been met, as the system continues to be severely under funded.