Several issues affecting sustainability of healthcare financing in Romania

Healthcare financing is a priority on international agenda and a challenge for all countries, no matter what their development level. Inefficiencies are present in all healthcare systems to a smaller or a larger extent. The 2010 World Health Report Health systems financing: the path to universal coverage estimates that from 20% to 40% of all health spending is currently wasted through inefficiency. Getting higher value for invested money is, thus, a major concern worldwide but mostly to developing countries since their economic situation does not always allow an increase in spending on health in order to improve health outcomes. In this context, the efficient use of the existing resources becomes the key challenge for these systems. This paper provides an analysis of the Romanian healthcare financing system and evaluates its performance based on several selected health financing indicators. Quantitative secondary data from national and international databases are used in order to present the patterns of health financing in Romania and to assess the performance of the system. The performed analysis allowed us to identify several issues that explain the low performance of the Romanian health financing system and to discuss them in the context of the implemented reforms and on the basis of the recommendations made by World Health Organization towards universal health coverage.