Health Legislation and the Organisation of the Healthcare System
Know the layers of the legal order
Health law is hierarchical. The Constitution guarantees protection of health; below it stand statutes (zakoni) such as the Law on Health Care, the Law on Compulsory Health Insurance and the Law on Protection of Patients Rights; below statutes sit ministerial ordinances and rulebooks (pravilnici), and only then institutional statutes and internal protocols. A question asking which act governs a situation usually turns on this hierarchy: a rulebook can never create or widen a right that a statute does not give.
Separate the functions, not just the names
Candidates must be able to place each body. The Ministry of Health sets policy, issues licences and supervises. The Croatian Health Insurance Fund (HZZO) collects contributions, contracts providers and pays for care. The Croatian Institute of Public Health handles epidemiology, registers and public health reporting. Professional chambers keep the register of licences and run disciplinary proceedings. Ownership is a fourth, separate question: state-owned clinical hospital centres, county-owned general hospitals and health centres, and private practices working under concession inside the public health service network (mreza javne zdravstvene sluzbe), which defines which providers deliver publicly funded care at primary, secondary and tertiary level.
Traps that recur
Typical distractors: treating a concession as privatisation, when it is a time-limited right to provide a public service under a contract with the founder; assuming counties found clinical hospital centres; confusing the payer with the regulator; and assuming private providers are automatically outside the public system. Another trap is emergency care, which must be given regardless of insurance status, documents or ability to pay.
Rule of thumb
For any organisational question ask, in order: who founds it, who funds it, who supervises it. If the answer names three different bodies, the question is probably testing exactly that separation.