Financing Regional Healthcare

With the challenges of health competencies devolution, demographic change and increasing healthcare needs arising, regions in charge of funding health systems will have to find new solutions. What are the levers for regions with healthcare responsibilities to finance their healthcare systems? AER Committee 2 is willing to investigate on these issues, to enable its member regions to exchange knowledge on this topic and to find out about innovative way to ensure their citizens an optimal health level.

Context

About 20 years ago, most European governments started a reflection on the level of decision taking in their health systems, the majority of which being until then dominated by the national state. Decentralisation was for many countries a crucial part in the reforms.
Advantages of regionalised health systems are acknowledged: they enable a better recognition of local realities and an increased adaptation of healthcare to the population’s needs. Also, in a number of cases, regional and local levels proved to have better capacities to integrated market mechanisms between service providers and backers.

Each European state has its own health funding system, developed over decades and that is part of the national cultural identity. In broad outline, European health systems are organised in three main categories:
Bismarck health systems, Beveridge health systems and mixed health systems (which apply mostly to Central and Eastern European countries, currently in transition).
Contribution mechanisms to finance healthcare traditionally include public and private funding, as well as out-of-pocket payments.

On this page, you will find information on:

• EU Funding instruments
• Public-Private Partnerships
• the Euregio III project, to which the AER is a Collaborating partner.