Report by the Baarsma Committee

The Baarsma Committee was asked to find an alternative tool for keeping expenditure on specialist medical care and curative mental healthcare manageable. Because of the statutory right to healthcare it is not possible to guarantee in advance that spending on care will remain within the Budgetary Framework for Care in all circumstances, but ancillary measures could be put in place to provide the maximum incentive for commercial operators to remain within the framework. In this way the government could control spending on specialist medical care and curative mental healthcare much better than is currently the case. Macromanagement tools that cause distortion would rarely if ever need to be used then, and would in fact serve as a last resort. The committee makes various recommendations on how to achieve this.