Prague, Feb 8 (CTK) – Most Czechs do not know how much medical treatment costs and what sums health insurers pay to hospitals for it, according to a survey organised by the major Czech health insurance company VZP.
In the survey, VZP asked how much a heart transplant, an appendix operation and childbirth cost, offering its clients four possible answers. In all cases, most of the clients failed to choose the correct answer.
Nearly half of the respondents selected the correct answer in cases of a heart transplant (47 percent), which costs approximately one million crowns, and appendectomy (48 percent), which costs 27,000 crowns.
Forty-three percent said a common childbirth costs 23,000 crowns and that the follow-up care for the newborn baby costs 8,000 crowns. Nearly the same number made the correct guess that the VZP will pay 8.7 billion crowns to general practitioners this year. The fact that VZP pays about 3,600 crowns for prescriptions per client a year was selected by 39 percent.
“Health care is not for free and we believe that people should know how much it costs,” VZP spokesman Oldrich Tichy said.
Such knowledge might motivate some people to pay more attention to their health, Tichy said.
Some Czech health insurance companies make the data on the costs of the patient’s medical treatment available to the patient online. Thanks to this system, patients can also check whether their general practitioner reported the care they received from the GP adequately.
The VZP survey was conducted among 788 of its clients in January.
VZP has nearly six million clients in the Czech Republic, a country with a population of 10.5 million.
($1=25.306 crowns)
