Only when health problems enter the circle of your closest ones can you understand how "alienated" the state health system in Serbia has become from its insured and patients, and how much this circumstance has triggered a private initiative that tries to fill the space of denied "free" services that only nominally follow you - because you have been paying health insurance contributions for decades.
In recent months, the Covid-crisis has only provided an alibi for the above-mentioned system of health institutions to "cool down" the hopes of all patients that they can receive decent and up-to-date treatment from that system, using the excuse of insufficient funds and investments in modern equipment and training of health personnel. True, for some, these high-quality services are available for free thanks to their social position or various relatives or friendly "connections", or because of individual examples of self-abnegation of medical and medical staff. Nevertheless, it seems to me from experience, and also according to many stories of acquaintances, that strict administration in health care is becoming a form of "white strike" in some parts of it. For example, if someone falls on the street and remains motionless on the asphalt, if you call the emergency services in Novi Sad, they will come to the scene and transfer you to the Emergency Center (where you will wait for several hours for the competent specialist to come from the nearby hospital to look at you and help you). If, however, your relatives drag you home somehow, and you only ask to be transported by ambulance to the competent health facility in the morning (because you are an immobile injured person), the doctor on duty will question you on the phone for about twenty minutes, and will tell you to ask your chosen doctor " referral" for transport to a specialist institution, where, again, you must have an "appointment", etc. Because the emergency service is for "saving lives", not for transporting immobile patients, as he said (according to their regulations).
This is where the story that I would like to tell begins. I will skip here the fact that you can get to reputable doctors in your area relatively quickly through private clinics and hospitals where they work part-time after hours in state medical institutions. However, then you enter the corridor of considerable costs because these private institutions are accompanied by a motley small economy. You can find companies on the Internet that deal with the transport of immobile patients, where you can also rent wheelchairs or standing potties, etc. Then you even have, in big cities, agencies that privately provide "home care", and sometimes even night home care. All this, of course, costs money, but it saves the family so that it can continue to function normally, and deprives state hospitals of the obligation to house thousands of patients who would have some right to permanent care according to the laws on health insurance.
Thus, to put it simply, one "reform move", with the introduction of "private medical practice", became an agent for the formation of an increasingly widespread "small economy" that solves the most difficult life problems of many families, and health problems are certainly the most difficult. Even if the health care system understood that it would be humane, and ultimately economically justifiable, to at least partially "refund" the costs incurred by insured persons who are treated in the "private practice" network (which requires Serbia to become a "state of law") then investments in mammoth hospitals, with often unused rolling stock and expensive and inexpertly used equipment, would be smaller, and the health fund would have more funds for innovative drugs, then devices and operating rooms that a private investor is unable to provide, and for accelerated specialization of medical personnel at leading medical centers in our country and in the world.
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