The Significance of Amenable Mortality Quantification for Financing the Health System in Slovakia

The indicators’ values of health condition of the Slovak citizens significantly lag behind the most developed countries. The issue of healthy inhabitants is more connected with a treatment of bad health condition than with a non-health prevention, which is believed to be caused by social and political development over the last decades. Measuring the influence of health system on inhabitants’ health is very difficult due to the influences of various factors, such as wealth, socio-economic status, citizen's lifestyle, quality of environments, etc. Consequently, an amenable mortality indicator is used to evaluate the health system except of the life expectancy indicator. It defines a mortality that should not have occurred in case of effective and early treatment. It only takes into consideration those diagnoses, where effective treatment exists before a certain age limit (75 years) according to experts. The number of these deaths is standardized on 100,000 citizens. The amenable mortality indicator has a great significance for standard comparisons, however, its application also causes methodological issues, such as data quality of mortality, choice of diagnoses, weight of diagnoses, etc. In the international comparing, it is very often deduced from a fact that each country spends different amount of funds on health, while the differences may be connected with a different effectiveness of invested funds in the health systems. The article reflects on the given facts and its aim is to evaluate the development of amenable mortality in Slovakia over the last ten years, as well as to compare the development of this indicator in the EU countries. Similarly, it assesses the significant methodological issues that are related to indicator's application and defines the causes of extreme differences that were found out by the results on the basis of the given outputs.