Igor Mazepa: Private medicine can develop without government support

Concorde Capital CEO Igor Mazepa is confident that private medicine in Ukraine can develop without the government support even in the midst of the coronavirus crisis

Igor Mazepa, investment banker, CEO and Founder of Concorde Capital investment company, commented in his interview for Interfax Ukraine that COVID-19 has exposed the incompetence of the public medicine and showed that private medicine can develop without the government support despite the coronavirus crisis.

“COVID-19 has exposed the incompetence of the public medicine and showed that private medicine can develop without government support despite the coronavirus crisis,” Igor Mazepa commented on the situation in the private medicine in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

“In my view, the coronavirus has exposed the failure of the public medicine. Now we are witnessing its collapse and unpreparedness for such challenges. This is despite the fact that public funding for the medical sector reaches about UAH 100 billion annually. In fact, with the current ineffective and obsolete model of administration of government-owned and municipal medical institutions, this money vanishes like water in sand. Therefore, I am confident that the share of public medicine will decline in favour of private medicine in the near future. As the largest private operator, Dobrobut will also grow. Before the quarantine measures were imposed, Dobrobut had already had more than one and a half million appointments a year. We plan to reach about two million patients in 2020,” comments Igor Mazepa.

“If we talk about financial performance, Dobrobut’s sales dropped by about 40% in April-May. There is nothing surprising or unexpected in this: restaurants earned nothing at all. Clinics and hospitals were not closed, but the demand for their services dropped quite considerably because of the lockdown. Dobrobut converted some of its buildings into in-patient hospitals for the treatment of COVID-19 patients.

Today, even without the coronavirus factor, Dobrobut is about to deliver 120% of the targets we set in December 2019, long before the pandemic broke out. We expect to finish the year with a 50% growth. Dobrobut is the only company in the Eastern Europe’s medical sector that has shown such growth over the past five years,” Igor Mazepa adds.

One can say that Dobrobut is an example of how medicine develops without government support.

“At the governmental level, the medicine is managed by mediocre populists. Therefore, little changes. What can be considered a real change? If nothing else, it would be a copayment mechanism to be introduced for patients and a really effective health insurance system. What is copayment? It means that if the government undertakes to pay, let’s say UAH 1,000 for a patient’s medical service provided by a polyclinic, and he/she does not want to run a risk of poor-quality medical care in a public hospital, but wants to receive a quality service in a private clinic, the government then pays the same UAH 1,000, and the patient pays the remaining amount from his/her pocket. This is fair. Compulsory health insurance is the next step. By the way, insurance companies are the best market regulator, because, unlike corrupt officials, insurance company always strive to ensure that their clients receive the top-notch service for a reasonable price.

When these two changes take place, hundreds of thousands of critically ill people will have a real chance to recover. In a balanced market, the Ministry of Health will not become a corrupt operator acting through its thousands of squalid hospitals and clinics, but would simply be a regulator that sets standards. Following these changes, officials would not be able to steal so much.”

Concorde Capital CEO and Founder Igor Mazepa shared his views in an exclusive interview with Interfax-Ukraine

For the full text of the interview, please go to the company’s website concorde.ua.

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