Law on private health care insurance

The individuals looking for better medical care than provided by the public healthcare system or simply not wanting to have anything more to do with the latter will be allowed to have the premiums paid for private medical insurance contracts deducted from their taxable income up to a certain extent.

A law draft enacted by the Government at the end of last week sets the deductibility limits for individuals to 2% of the gross taxable income and to 2% of the wage fund for those employers paying for such an insurance on behalf of their employees.

“Private insurance will help develop something that is the real health care insurance, because the Public health insurance Law did not sufficiently assimilate the contractual insured/insurer relation,” said Eugenia Erhan, director with the Health Ministry, who worked on this draft.

The draft defines the service packages that will be possible to offer to those choosing this system: complementary services (i.e. those not covered by the public insurance), additional (higher quality) services or substitutive (all kinds of) services. Still, not even those choosing the third set of services will be exempted from public insurance payment.

In fact, the market is one step ahead of the authorities in this sector, as well, so that there are private health insurance providers – private medical practices or clinics or insurance companies that offer cash compensations to their insured clients in case of illness. Therefore the big – and after all, expected, news in this draft is the deductibility.

sorin.pislaru@zf.rox