Cross-border Purchases of Health Services : A Case Study on Austria and Hungary
This paper explores the structure of cross-border health purchasing between Austria and Hungary and determines the size of this phenomenon as well as the barriers to a further increase. Austrian patients may receive health care treatment in Hungary...
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| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000158349_20090129130519 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/4022 |
| Summary: | This paper explores the structure of
cross-border health purchasing between Austria and Hungary
and determines the size of this phenomenon as well as the
barriers to a further increase. Austrian patients may
receive health care treatment in Hungary in three different
ways. First, patients may receive benefits in the context of
the European Community Regulations 1408/71 and 574/72
(Category I patients). Second, outside those regulatory
structures, Austrian patients travel to Hungary to receive
medical treatment, especially dental treatment, and then
seek reimbursement from their Austrian insurance (Category
II patients). Third, some patients receive medical treatment
in Hungary outside both schemes (Category III patients).
There are about 42,500 Category I patients per year; and
58,000 Category II patients world-wide per year. An unknown
but supposedly greater number of patients travel to Hungary
to receive mainly dental treatment and cosmetic surgery
(Category III). Most health actors in both Austria and
Hungary do not regard cross-border purchasing of health
services as having cost-saving effects. They put forward
major legal, institutional, political, and psychological
barriers, which inhibit public and private Austrian
providers, to facilitate trade in health care and which
inhibit individual patients to realize cost savings through
capitalizing on lower health care prices in Hungary.
Therefore, for the time being, trade in health care and
patient mobility between Austria and Hungary is a
circumscribed phenomenon in terms of quantities, and it will
most probably remain so in the near future. |
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