Private Health Insurance and Medical Subscriptions – Two Faces of the Private Pre-paid Funding of Health Care in Poland
Private Health Insurance and Medical Subscriptions – Two Faces of the Private Pre-paid Funding of Health Care in Poland

Author(s): Magdalena Osak
Subject(s): National Economy, Health and medicine and law, Financial Markets, Socio-Economic Research
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: private health insurance; medical subscriptions; pre-paid plans; health care financing; Poland;
Summary/Abstract: Health care in Poland is financed from mixed sources, both private and public. Similarly to the majority of developed countries, public funds are the main source of financing. However, since the 1990s private expenditure has constituted a significant proportion of the total expenditure on health. Apart from out-of-pocket payments, which are the main source of generating private resources, pre-paid plans are used. The paper presents the legal and market coexistence of private health insurance (PHI) and other pre-paid schemes in the form of the so-called “medical subscriptions”. The analysis will be focused, inter alia, on: the value of collected funds, the number of operating providers, and the percentage of the population covered. One of the leading goals will be to stress the specific character of the Polish legal state of affairs among private pre-paid plans. This is especially important when making international comparisons devoted to PHI schemes as a different legal status can influence the findings of the market analysis. The need to draw public attention to legal differences is critically important if they are not rooted in the functional aspect of different mechanisms of funding, which is the case in Poland.

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