Special aspects of private medical entity status as to registration, licensing and medical services
The article follows a classic structure: the reason why the issue is acute, overview of relevant scientific literature, methodology, theoretical and practical conclusions ranged as to the structure of the main part. The main part consists of two substructures regarding the aspects of administrative and civil law. Nevertheless, due to the fact that medical law embodies both public and private law aspects and public law influence is stronger (because the sphere of regulation is of high social importance), it is sometimes too hard to divide related aspects. The aim is to find the mentioned peculiarities and to evaluate them as to reasonability and sufficiency. To reach the aim, the authors have analyzed current laws, scientific and common articles, and examples of contracts. As a result, some ubiquitous conclusions have been reached. The legal basics are mostly the same for both public and private medical entities. Such concurrence is not fully reasoned as long as there is certain specificity in the private legal entity position and business. It is obviously understood by the legislator as far as we can judge by the legal project of law regulating private medical business. However, the attempt to enforce it was an epic fail, though there is an obvious necessity to have some special laws regarding private medical entities, especially to meet patients' expectations. As a case in point, not very representative though, we can say that there is one regulation to accept medical students for internship for public and private entities. In the aspects where we see some special rules for private medical entities, such as participation in state compulsory health insurance program, such special rules are sometimes arbitrary, putting private entities in a worse business position compared to public medical organisations. Nevertheless, some of such rules are designed to bring balance to the mentioned positions. For example, the introduction of self regulation and the existence of self-governing organisations with a strong lobby position and good possibilities can compensate the lack of state support. In part, peculiarities in the position of private medical entities are not introduced by the law, but naturally stem from everyday life. That is so when we look at the licensing procedures which are compensated by state support for public medical entities. Another natural difference lies in the fact that private medical entities are more often party to a medical service contract than a medical aid provider (speaking in the terms of legislation), the latter has more to do with public medical entities. Hence, any private medical entity has more party autonomy regarding contract terms. Nevertheless, legislation and court practice stand for tort liability for any bodily harm despite the contract, which is highly unfair. To sum up, we can conclude that the private medical entity position regulation looks like patchwork and needs more attention, reforming and a wellthought system.