The unsustainable situation of the tedious and long waiting lists of the public health system favours the contracting of private insurance, according to the Observatory for the Monitoring of Competition in the Health Care Sector elaborated by BRAINTRUST. The number of insured continues to grow in Spain year after year.
The number of health insurance policyholders continues to grow year after year. According to the latest data available from ICEA (Investigación Cooperativa entre Entidades Aseguradoras y Fondos de Pensiones), in the first half of 2017, the number of private health insurance policies stood at 11.5 million.
Long waiting lists cause many citizens to opt for private insurance. When analysing the 2016 Insurance Rate in Spain by Autonomous Community, the data obtained by BRAINTRUST in the Observatory for the Monitoring of Competition in the Healthcare Sector show notable regional disparities. These data are analogous to the Report carried out by the IDIS Foundation, Análisis de situación 2017. Both reports show that Madrid (34%), the Balearic Islands (30%), Catalonia (29%), and the Basque Country (22%) are the Autonomous Communities with the highest rate of insurance; at the other extreme, with a penetration of less than 12%, are the Autonomous Community of Navarre, Cantabria and the Region of Murcia. In terms of private healthcare expenditure in 2017, the Autonomous Regions with the highest per capita expenditure were: Comunidad de Madrid €713, País Vasco €690, Cataluña and Illes Balears €689; those with the lowest: Castilla la Mancha €426, Extremadura €431 and Murcia €453, according to Análisis de Situación 2018, Fundación IDIS.
On the other hand, the Observatory has also counted public and private hospitals and health care beds. Of the 788 hospitals in Spain, 451 are private (57%) and of the 157,665 beds, 32.5% are private. These data show that more than half of the hospitals are private, while only one bed in three is private.
BRAINTRUST's analysis shows that the private hospitals with the largest capacity are located in Catalonia, despite being one of the Autonomous Regions with the fewest public resources in relation to its population size. Fifty-five percent of private hospitals are concentrated in Catalonia (32%), Andalusia (13%) and the Community of Madrid (10%), which also account for 62% of beds. The sharp decrease in beds in public hospitals is significant, year-on-year variation 2016-2017, -13.5%, while in private hospitals it is practically unchanged (-0.23%), even so, more than 67% of hospital beds are in public hospitals.
