Valencia claims 723.3 million euros from Madrid for health care for displaced persons and foreigners

Thursday 4th November 2021 – PRESS RELEASE with Mike Smith

The Generalitat Valenciana has agreed to authorize the regional health department to claim 723.3 million euros from the Spanish Government, which corresponds to the amount owed to the Comunidad Valenciana for health care for displaced people from other autonomous regions of the country as well as foreign visitors.

This amount pending collection responds to the inoperability of the mechanisms established to compensate for this health expenditure, the Assistance Guarantee Fund and the Health Cohesion Fund

Regarding national displaced persons, RDL 16/2012 created the Assistance Guarantee Fund (FOGA), an instrument that was launched to assist the compensation of health expenses between autonomous communities that send and receive displaced people and that should have resolved the imbalance suffered by the autonomous tourist communities in the care of temporary displaced people from other territories.

However, almost 10 years after its approval, RDL 16/2012 has only been developed (since January 2014) to compensate for primary care and pharmacy prescriptions, but not in the field of specialized care. Thus, there are unpaid amounts: payments in primary and prescription prior to 2014 (23.1 million) and payments in charge of specialized care (558.4 million). To this must be added another 55.5 million euros for pending liquidations of the Health Cohesion Fund.

Among all these concepts is the accumulated debt with the Comunidad Valenciana since 2012 in respect of attention to nationally displaced people amounts to 637 million euros.

Regarding foreign displaced people, in accordance with current regulations, the Ministry of Health bills for health care to citizens with a European Health Card or from countries with a reciprocal health care agreement. In other words, it is the communities that bill for the care for foreign patients, but the payments made by third countries for the care of their citizens are channeled through the State Administration (National Institute of Social Security and the Ministry of Health ).

The Comunidad Valenciana invoiced the sum of 371.25 million euros for care for international patients between 2003 and 2020, while in that time it received 284.91 million from the State. In this way, the difference between what is billed and the money settled by the State for this concept shows an imbalance that represents a loss of 86.33 million euros accumulated between 2003 and 2020.

In this way, the sum between the accumulated debt with the Comunidad Valenciana in respect of health care to national displaced persons (637 million euros) and the losses in the attention to foreign patients (86.3 million euros), yields an amount of 723.3 million euros owed as a result of the lack of adequate compensation for this care benefit.