Croatian 2008-2010 health insurance reform: Hard choices toward financial sustainability and efficiency

摘要

Over the past two decades, Croatian social health insurance system has undergone a number of reforms that were aimed at addressing the rising financial gap between the demand for health care and available public resources. The single most important observation regarding its development until 2008 is that, while attempting to provide quick fix solutions to worrying financial performance, the implemented reforms did not adequately take into account some of the root causes of the system's sustainabil-ity issues, such as high public spending, a narrow base of financial contributors, generous benefits, and system inefficiencies that resulted in unnecessary expenditures and in low financial discipline.