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ABSTRACT: The significant gap between the quality of life and the level of health expenditure has led to the need to reconsider the modalities and the sources of collecting and redirecting the funds of the sanitary sector in such a way that sustainable medical results are generated for the entire population of the globe. Under these circumstances, the role of private health insurance is constantly increasing, even though its importance is still being influenced by the types of social policy and the dimension of the public health sector at national level. Due to the impact of these factors, the actual dimension of private health insurance market varies significantly across countries. In order to be able to realistically assess the level of development of the private health insurance market in Romania, the analysis has to be taken further than the simplistic measurement of indicators such as income and expenditure.
KEY WORDS: private health insurance; density of private health insurance; degree of penetration of private health insurance.
JEL CLASSIFICATION: I10; I11; I13.
1.INTRODUCTION
Most commonly, market analysis undertaken in the field of health insurance usually measures the share of private expenditure in relation to total health expenditure. According to the latest available data on Romania during the years 2005 and 2009, 18,03% (World Health Organization - Global Health Observatory Data Repository, apps.who.int/ghodata/) of total health expenditure were borne directly by the insured, additional to compulsory health insurance contributions, whereas the European average was 1,65 percentage points lower, representing 16.38% of the total health expenditure (apps.who.int/ghodata/) (figure 1).
Apparently, the private health sector in Romania is somewhat comparable to the one in the European Union. Should the analysis be taken further through the use of specific indicators such as insurance penetration degree and insurance density (The Geneva Association - Global insurance industry fact sheet, Geneva, 2011, p. 2), the results show a significant gap between the private health insurance market in Romania and the average market size in Europe.
According to the results in Table no.1, while the penetration degree in Europe averaged about 0,72% between the years 2005-2010, Romania's penetration degree during the same period barely reached 0,006% (Matei & Mihart, 2012).
In comparison to other countries in Europe (both members and non-members of the EU),...