184 Finances – Challenges of the future 1. Introduction The global financial and economic crisis is felt in almost all the companies that operate on the European financial and insurance markets. The European insurance and re-insurance industry has registered a significant decrease of the investments and a reduction of certain insurance lines’ weight within the portfolio. In Romania the contributions to the insurance companies are not guaranteed in case of financial problems as it happens with deposits. Moreover, the Romanian insurance companies are mainly owned by the major heavily involved insurers of the worldwide global financial markets that presently find themselves in acute crisis period. Considering these circumstances, many people have waived their insurance contracts and further withdrew money with the rigor losses and placed them into a bank deposit, which, at least theoretically, is a safer option than pitching them within an insurance contract. So, the Romanian insurance market has gone down in the last years, decreasing the private health insurance subscriptions as well. The crisis has strongly affected the profit margins of insurers and has hit the life insurance sector, which could only be supported by the state by introducing the deductibility of premiums. In Romania, the premiums paid for life insurances are not deductible from taxes, compared with other countries that have benefited from such deductibilities for several years by now. But the Ministry of Finance, the institution that could change this situation, says the Romanian fiscal system does not allow the introduction of such incentives 1 . 2. Characteristics of the private health insurance market in Romania Unfortunately, the Romanian private health insurance market rounds up to an annual figure of only a couple of millions euro, due to the lack of financial and sanitary education, low incomes, lack of fiscal stimulants and the present financial crisis. It’s considered that only about 10% of the country’s population owns a private health insurance or a subscription to a private medical centre. We’ve considered of a great interest an analysis regarding the evolution of the private health insurance market in Romania, for the 2001-2009 period, according to tables no. 1 and 2. The first period that we have considered is the 2001-2004 time interval, the data being available starting with the 2001 first annual report of the Insurance Supervisory Commission (ISC). The private health care insurance market developed slowly. For 2004, the market leader of the Romanian private health insurances was Carpatica Asigurări, with a market share of 23,13%, determined as a ratio of the subscribed gross insurance premiums for general 1 Ciumaş C., Nistor I., Dragoş S., Văidean V.,The Potential Effects of the Crisis – the Romanian Insurance Market, The Financial and Economic Crisis-Causes, Effects and Solutions Alma Mater Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca, 2009, pag. 132- 135 THE PRIVATE HEALTH INSURANCE MARKET IN ROMANIA – PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE Lect. Ioan Alin NISTOR, PhD Assist. Prof. Viorela Ligia VĂIDEAN, PhD student “Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj Napoca