23.06.2015

"There is a real risk at the end of the year the healthcare system to experience quite serious difficulties ensuing from its current financial status and for this reason I would like right away to alarm, as a Finance Minister, that the sector is in a free fall and this will inevitably be manifested in the next couple of months unless urgent measures are taken." Minister of Finance Vladislav Goranov said the above during the forum "The Healthcare Reform: a Business Diagnosis" organized by the Confederation of Employers and Industrialists in Bulgaria (KRIB).

Minister Goranov pointed out that in the past years - since 2009, the public finance concerning healthcare had been increasing extremely fast compared to the general economic development of the country and the nominal increase of GDP. He reminded that "2009 ended with BGN 2 600 billion healthcare expenditures and 2014 - with almost BGN 4 billion. This means that the nominal growth of the expenditures for this sector is 30-40% and there is no such growth either of domestic inflation or of GDP". The analysis on which the Finance Minister focused shows that this increase in healthcare expenditures will pose a serious problem of healthcare exerting pressure on the other sectors financed by the government and will be a challenge for the decisions that need to be taken very quickly. Another problem defined by Minister Goranov is that in 2014, as compared to 2013, the total increase of revenues to the consolidate budget was about BGN 440 million, which is almost equal to the amount of the total increase in healthcare expenditures reported in 2014. "This means that the amount of all the additional sums to the budget is comparable to the increase in the consolidated healthcare expenditures. It is no accident that 2014, too, ended with quite a large consolidated deficit", said the Minister of Finance.

Vladislav Goranov categorically said to the healthcare business representatives that "all efforts made by Minister Moskov should be supported in order to enable the very fast implementation of the possible measures to balance the system, in line with the possibilities of the society.  According to Minister Goranov a problem in this connection is the populism which prevails in the debate on the healthcare reform, the unwillingness to identify the real problem and the speed of the reform which is not achieved. "The real problem is the extremely inefficient healthcare system; the non-recognition of this fact leads to escalation of the problems and to the very high price that the Bulgarian public pays for relatively the same quality", said the Finance Minister. As an example he pointed out that the total healthcare expenditures for 1998 were BGN 810 million and now - BGN 4 billion, but the access to and the quality to the service had not notably improved.

Minister Goranov said that it looked like the NHIF budget would have a shortage of BGN 200 million in 2015, too, despite the high expenditure levels generated in the system year after year. He warned that NHIF was a tool of funding and distributing people's resources from health insurance contributions but there was a great risk the latter not to be sufficient to cover NHIF needs.