Private Healthcare Institutions and Insurance Companies: from Cooperators to Market Competitors

Abstract

The provision of adequate healthcare nowadays has a global character, so the implementation of efficient andwell-formulated health reforms has become of serious importance. Among many contemporary trends in this area, there is a tendency of privatization of health care institutions and growth in private insurance premiums. This raises the necessity of developing a cooperation between private healthcare institutions and insurance companies in order to provide services of an improved quality. This paper emphasizes the extremes of their cooperation, moving from fully integrated systems towards competition over the market. The findings indicate that, due to the insufficient development of Serbian healthcare sector, their cooperation is so far not at a highlevel, which brings many issues into question and that should be legally better defined.