Czech state to define what treatment is too costly luxury - press

Prague - The Czech state will define what medical treatment is a too expensive luxury under the health care reform and doctors will have to choose a method for a "reasonable price," the daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) writes today.

It adds that the state will for the first time admit that it cannot fully cover all types of medical treatment.

Health Minister Leos Heger (TOP 09) will soon issue instructions saying it must be assessed whether the benefit of a new method of treatment is proportional to its costs, HN says.

Heger has set up a commission over it that is to start working as from February, HN writes.

"We will first test it in a pilot operation... It should be embedded in law as from next year," Heger´s adviser Pavel Veprek said.

In the future practice, experts would first assess new devices or artificial joints, for instance, and then it must be decided whether the Czech Republic can afford them, the paper adds.

It will be a two-phase process in which representatives of the state, health insurers, doctors and the public will have "the voting right," HN writes.

A similar approach is to be applied to medicines as of 2013, HN writes.

"No state can pay everything that medicine offers. We must choose what is incontrovertibly efficient as well as what brings the biggest benefit to patients with reasonable costs," HN cites Veprek as saying.

Consequently, health insurers will not cover some brand new methods in the future though they might help patients more than a less expensive treatment.

This is a real breakthrough in the Czech health care system. For the first time "the price of human life" is to be set, in dependence on GDP level., HN points out.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) a new medical technology pays only if a year of a good-quality life it secures does not cost more than a triple GDP level per capita. It is now some 1.092 million crowns in the Czech Republic, HN writes.

However, a new system does not mean that all very expensive treatment will automatically become a luxury that ordinary people cannot afford, the paper writes.

Biological medicines against multiple sclerosis, for instance, will still be fully covered by insurance, General Health Insurance Company (VZP) director Pavel Horak told HN.

In an interview for HN, Horak also says everyone should have the right to sign an additional insurance policy for the treatment beyond the framework normally covered by health insurance.

Author: CTK
www.ctk.cz

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