Wednesday, 25 November 2009 at Rembrandt Hotel a small, but specialized group of people participated at the conference “Practical insight in the Romanian VAT/tax system for small entrepreneurs”

The conference was opened by Mr. Peter Jansen, one of the founding members of NRCC, who presented the speaker of the evening, Mr. Alexandru Cristea from Deloitte Tax.

The conference was more in a form of a meeting between people activating in the tax or financial domain or interested on the subject of VAT ant its principles.

Mr. Cristea began his presentation by stating that VAT is more than a tax. It has a complex theory, many pricipals and it is very interpretable especially when exceptions make the subject of applying VAT or not. Basically VAT is applied to any person that has continuous economic activity, no matter if juridical or individual.   An important advantage of the VAT is that through it the movement of goods or services within European Union may be traced.

The meeting was a very interactive one because the participants were very involved in the discussion. A lot of points came under debate regarding the way VAT is applied and deducted, the place of taxation in case the transaction is concluded between companies from different countries, new rules as of 2010 and the VAT legislation in Romania and European Union.

After the conference the participants were able to discuss among each other and interact.

More information regarding VAT may be found by folowing the links below:

Sponsored by: Merck Sharp& Dohme

Wednesday, 28 of October 2009 the Public Healthcare in Romania seminar took place at McMoni’s.

In his presentation Mr. Popa brought the attention on the fact that Romania is on the 32^nd place from 33 countries in Europe, barely in front of Bulgaria.

And the situation doesn’t seem to get better considering that public health budget is at the lowest point in 9 years with 3% of GDP.

Another major problem in the public health system is consisted in informal payments. In 2008, 60% of the people who paid for hospitalization, made informal payments. This results in 30% of expenditures from the medical services market.

Although now the whole picture of public healthcare doesn’t look very well, the future can bring a real growth and improvement.

As Mr. Popa presented, the steps to a better health plan would be: economic convergence with Europe; cleaning up the grey economy; health reform; health insurance.

The demographics are to be considered as Romania’s population is getting older, a lot of people suffer from chronic diseases, immigration has a high rate, and doctors are leaving the country to work abroad.

Mr. Oostveen approached the problem of public healthcare from a doctor’s perspective.

The badly distributed low budget, the frequent changes of the Minister of Health and straightly said, the indifference of the Romanian Government are the main issues in the present situation of the public healthcare system.

The hospitals have a bad architecture and a poor infrastructure. The equipment is old especially in the hospitals outside Bucharest or big cities. And which is worse, in Romania only three hospitals are accordingly to European standards.

The communication inside the system also lacks in organization, and informal payments are at a very high level, which can’t bring any improvement.

Mr. Oostveen’s solution for the future is the construction of a polyclinic with all the medical specialties, accessible to everybody, but with a period of hospitalization no longer then two days. For more serious problems the patients will be sent to hospitals.

Of course the idea of such a polyclinic is very good and will be profitable for everybody on long term, but who will finance it? Well, the money should come from the state and population contribution.

The public healthcare system should function better if the hospitals would collaborate more, including private clinics, in the idea of sharing equipment and information.

Mr. Pollmann took the stand presenting the subject of public healthcare from a pharmaceutical point of view.

The beginning point of the presentation was that Romania is indeed almost the last one of the European countries when it comes to public healthcare. The total healthcare spend per capita and consumption of medicines per inhabitant in EU27 ranks Romania near the bottom of the consume fot healthcare.

Pharmaceuticals are the necessary preventive treatment to prevent hospitalization. Especially on long term the costs of preventing and early treatment of a disease are lower then treating it at an advance stage or act surgically.

What is happening now in the healthcare system cannot bring any improvement and the future is rather gray.

A very good example is the Government emergency ordinance modification law 95/2006 from 4 October 2009 which has three main implications:
- good for Romanian healthcare budget
- bad for healthcare and patient
- supply system of pharmacies to patients will stop

Mr. Pollmann ended his speech with an example of how economically illogic the Romanian Government acts, presenting the 2001 AIDS treatment case when Merck lowered the medicine price by 86%.

With a steady increase from the Government of the health budget and the low prices of the medication offered by Merck, the volume in sales should go up high. However, this was not the case because the Government decided to buy the drugs from a different company, although at a higher price. Eventually Merck lost the complete HIV market.