Hospitals will be allowed to make profits and accept private investments from 2010, two years earlier than previously proposed, if health minister Ab Klink gets his way, reports today’s Financieele Dagblad.

Klink has told MPs that he wants to give healthcare institutions the freedom to become a new form of legal entity, a ‘social enterprise’, in three years time. At present most hospitals are foundations which are non-profit.
While Klink now wants to give hospitals the opportunity to make profits, he intends to put limits of how these can be spent. Part of the profits will have to remain within the healthcare sector, he says.
‘The idea is to set limits as to how much of the profit can be paid out to attract new capital,’ the minister says in a letter to MPs.
Klink’s Christian Democrat colleague, justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin also wants to introduce the ‘social enterprise’ legal entity for other public institutions such as universities, colleges and social housing corporations.
Hirsch Ballin will send his proposal to these organisations today with a October 1 deadline for their reactions, says the FD.
Under the proposals, a ‘social enterprise’ must have a board consisting of interested parties (patients, parents or tenants) as well as a management and supervisory board.