Our paper is based on four country samples – Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia
and Slovenia. All these countries are new EU member states, where the (official)
goal of the health-finance system is to guarantee universal and equal access to
health services. In the first part the country studies describe the evolution of new
health-finance systems in selected countries as well as the pros and cons of national
solutions. The core part of this paper discusses two important health-financing
issues – the decision about how to fund health services and particularly the decision
about the relations of public and private funding of health care. We propose two core
conclusions: first, because the mode of financing does not have a clear impact on
outcomes of the health-care system, the decisions of CEE countries to switch from
general taxation to social-insurance systems are based mainly on political rationality;
second, introducing pluralistic social health insurance during early phases of
transition is too risky.