Hospital funding fuels corruption: The reimbursement system was already crooked twenty years ago, and patients are losing out

I'll be on the show tonightCzech television

to comment on the funding of hospitals, which is unfortunately set up in such a way as to encourage corruption. Reimbursement decrees and amendments, bonuses for the purchase of drugs and technology, "cross-financing" of unfairly underfunded fields by overcharging elsewhere.

None of this is new. The healthcare legislation, which concerns the payment of care, medicines, aids, but also the control over health insurance companies, was distorted twenty years ago - the biggest "hell" happened in the years approx. 2005-2008. To this day, people at the European Commission can't help but wonder how we "took off" the Transparency Directive on drug pricing so that it only looks transparent, but actually allows for arbitrariness in setting the prices and reimbursement of drugs. And the distribution of billions from health insurance companies to hospitals is still a curiosity today - a toss-up between public and private law, which is not subject either to the rules of economic competition (where VZP in particular would immediately run into the rules of anti-monopoly law), but also to the rules of awarding public contracts from compulsorily collected money (where it would be absolutely impossible to hand out contracts and reimbursement supplements without proper, transparent competition, only as a "deal" between the provider and the insurance company according to the famous § 17 paragraph 5 ZoVZP). But subsequent governments are not without fault - each of them could have fixed it, none of them did.

I have been pointing this out for almost the entire 15 years, regardless of the currently ruling parties. In the process, I met several honest people across the parties - from Christians to Socialists to Pirates - who all did badly politically because they were fired, fired, not put up for the next election. And on the contrary, a lot of monsters whose proficiency in "moving in the system" brought them to career heights and the club of multi-millionaires. Who took it away? Patients who could have received more care, for the same taxpayer money, instead ended up "on the waiting list" or having to go to court for care. Taxpayers who paid for overpriced health and services through insurance. Medical professionals who, for doing good work for patients and refusing to prescribe according to payments and bonuses, were "deservedly punished" professionally and career-wise. Honest businessmen and managers who did not have the stomach to pursue their luck through deliberately ineffective, sometimes literally corrupt procedures, which caused their hospital, clinic or business to suffer failure or collapse.

I am glad that after the sad period of useless, confrontational programs, I was able to do on CT what I could have done before, in the pre-political period, and what belongs on public television - describe real problems, name their causes, propose solutions. The management spent the whole morning with me, on a beautiful weekend day, and it was not difficult for them to listen to the "boring law" including the historical-economic-political excursion. Of course, it won't make it into the program in its entirety - but I'm still sincerely happy for the interest in a topic that, in its importance for people, far exceeds any petty personal skirmishes between influencers or party politicians.

I will continue to address this topic - both in the Health Committee (SANT) of the European Parliament and at the level of the Czech Republic and individual regions. Here it is not so important to "put a dog's head" on this or that hospital director; the important thing is to set up the system in such a way that it naturally allows the honest to succeed. That is not the case today, but this government has the necessary majority and all the tools to make it happen. If she succeeds, I will praise her despite different political affiliations. If not, he will have no excuse before the election.