The Health Ministry of Ukraine must approve a model for calculating the cost of healthcare services, the notion of which has been introduced into the Ukrainian legislation after passing the bill providing autonomy to clinics in spring 2017, Head of the parliamentary committee for healthcare Olha Bohomolets has said.

"Parliament launched the healthcare reform in April when it passed bill No. 2309 initiated by the Verkhovna Rada committee for healthcare and the president signed it into law. This is so-called law providing autonomy to clinics. It first introduced "the healthcare service" notion into our legislation and permitted to pay for it. The Health Ministry must approve a model for calculating the cost of healthcare services to understand what sum is funded by the state for treating concrete patients and let the law get rolling," she said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

Bohomolets said that when the bill was drawn up, many lawmakers feared that this would result in the privatization of health institutions.

"The medical service is, in fact, commercialization, but our task was not to commercialize medicine, but to introduce a new unit of calculation, the quality of which can be checked and guaranteed. Earlier, the unit for calculating the budget was a hospital that received funding simply for what it is. Now a new unit is a medical service that is provided to a concrete patient. The money for the patient has already "gone", but still "have not arrived," since the Health Ministry can not say how much money and for which patient it should "go," she said.