The good news is that the General practitioners will be able to provide referrals easier

The hospitals that provide emergency admission of patients this year will receive up to 95 percent of the amounts they had in 2014. The health care institutions that do not offer emergency admissions will receive up to 90 percent of what they received a year earlier. This was voted by the Supervisory Board of the Health Insurance Fund after a three-hour meeting on the subject. The new rules for money allocation to the hospitals were supported by all the representatives of the State in the Supervisory Board of the Fund.

According to the representatives of the trade unions, patients and employers, however, the so voted rules will form a large waiting list of patients and will lead to a deficit in the budget for health. They voted against these rules, rules that provide for hospitals to receive between 5 and 10 percent less than last year. Also, no money in excess of planned, spent buy the hospitals, will be paid.  If a hospital spends less than planned for the quarter, the balance will not be transferred for the next three months.

All this is done in order not to overspend money for health, said the director of the NHIF Dr. Rumyana Todorova. According to her, the deficit of the fund is expected to be only BGN 15 million this year and will be covered with money from better collection of health insurance installments. If a hospital still fails to be within its budget, it can take additional 5 percent, but it will have to return this amount next month. The new rules also provide that should this be implemented, it will reduce the price of clinical paths provide more new rules.

According to Dr. Ivan Kokalov, Chairman of the trade unions in health care, these budgets will form a large waiting list and thus the patients will be racketeered. They will have to go from hospital to hospital to find that one, the limit of which is not yet spent, or to pay. So the one with money will live, concluded the union representative.

However the good news this year is that the patients will get more easily refferals to a specialist or laboratory. The reason is that the funds allocated refferals correspond to the actual costs of last year. Also a more flexible mechanism for the allocation of money is adopted, said Dr. Tsvetan Raichinov, Head of the Medical association. The funds will be redistributed among the specialists in the same quarter for which they are allocated, and not for the next.