The Border Between Bribery And Sponsorship Of A Medic-Public Servant, In The Exercise Of His Duties

Present paper aims to analyze the situation of a medic, civil servant in the exercise of his duties, who is compelled to ask the patient to pay the provided medical services from his own funds. The economic and social context of Romania over the last ten years, along with Romania's entry into the economic crisis, has led to drastic austerity measures. A major area that has been affected was the medical field in which patients were faced with two situations. On the one hand, in order to benefit from medical services, reimbursed by the Romanian state, they had to be included on waiting lists, and on the other hand, they had the possibility to sign a sponsorship contract with the medical unit and to pay out of their own funds the medical services they were receiving. Thus, as many people have opted for the sponsorship contract, this situation has come to the attention of anticorruption prosecutors who have considered that signing of a sponsorship contract is a disguised form of bribery of the medic. In the context of the fight against corruption, prosecutors investigated whether the constitutive elements of the bribery offense were met in these conditions. The present study follows the arguments used by lawyers to prove that signing a sponsorship contract between a patient and the medical unit not only cannot have criminal connotations but the most important that the criminal responsibility of the physician involved cannot be attributed.