Web-economic-crisis-health-systems-and-health-web

Austria
Thomas Czypionka and Maria M. Hofmarcher
Economic trends
• Austria's economy contracted in 2009 at a rate comparable to the
European mean, but quickly returned to pre-crisis growth rates. While
deficit levels have hovered around the European average in every year,
10-year bond rates are low. Government spending as a share of GDP
has stayed in the highest quintile, and health spending as a share of
government spending is also comparably high.
• Unemployment rates have consistently been among the lowest in Europe.
• Public health care spending per capita has grown steadily since 2000,
although growth rates slowed since 2008 (Austria: Fig. 1).
• Austria Fig. 2 gives the trends in per capita spending on health.
Policy responses
Changes to public funding for the health system
• The Health Fund Law introduced an annual federal government cash
transfer to SHI to help sickness funds to balance budgets, conditional on the
sickness funds defining and achieving a cost-containment “roadmap” (2009).
• In parallel, a Debt Forgiveness Law wrote off debts accumulated by the
sickness funds in the years prior to the crisis (€150 million written off per year
between 2010 and 2012) (2009); the cash transfer was set at €100 million
in 2010 and cut to €40 million in 2011 because of crisis-related budget
consolidation; tax-funded subsidies for health insurance are being kept in
spite of balanced budget sheets.
• However, the cut had negligible effect as sickness funds had consolidated
their finances between 2008 and 2010 through improvements in
purchasing and, more importantly, as a result of robust revenue growth
coming from the favourable employment figures, resulting in financial
surpluses; to meet EU fiscal targets, the federal government established a
consolidation package to cut its spending by €26 billion between 2012
and 2016, with an estimated 13% of the cut coming from the health
sector (2011).