FINDINGS ABOUT THE MAIN DRIVERS FOR MEDICAL SERVICES AND PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IN ROMANIA

While the Romanian healthcare market continues to grow, it remains significantly influenced by the Government's not yet very successful endeavour to allocate an increasing share from GDP to the health sector. The overall incidence of mid and longterm disease above the European Union average requires a health system improvement in Romania. In that regard, developing a better framework for integration of the public and private healthcare organizations might prove an effective strategy, as demonstrated by similar successful models used by other developed countries. Under that paradigm, a basic health services package provided by the public system is adjusted by complementary and supplementary packages provided by private system to cover specific needs that the public health system has difficulties to provide a permanent solution for. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the patients' satisfaction drivers and how much these are already covered by the public services, for the private system to cover the gap with the private health insurance packages. The practical implications of this paper are that the population who is willing to pay for these services and for whom the public budget will be relieved of the corresponding expenditure, will support decreasing the pressure on the public health system, encouraging more population towards preventive healthcare that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated already