The fundamental aim of healthcare and healthcare policies is to extend life expectancy and improve the quality of life. In addition to ensuring the treatment of the sick, a policy on healthcare must also include prevention, the promotion of a healthier lifestyle and the improvement of the quality of life of the chronically ill and the disabled.
The UATUC strongly supports the model of universal healthcare as it exists in Croatia. 
We stand for strong and efficient public healthcare based on social solidarity, a user-oriented model and decent working conditions for all workers within the system.
Unfortunately, all the previous reforms of the Croatian public healthcare system have been partial and often guided primarily by the principle of saving costs and the commercialisation of healthcare services. 
We cannot accept the division of citizens into those who will have greater healthcare rights because they can buy them and the majority whose right to health will, in the same way, be substantially reduced or denied.

Emphasis should be put on strengthening preventive medicine; the wide availability of healthcare services to all citizens, regardless of social status and place of residence; the improvement of primary healthcare; and the development of public healthcare that will be able to attract and retain leading specialists. Treatment outcomes must be significantly improved.
The system must be user-oriented, while computerisation and better organisation must enable workers to access healthcare when they need it with as short a period of absence from work as possible.
The healthcare system needs to be better organised and instances of the irrational and even corrupt leakage of funds must be closed down. The state must stop expecting that contributions from wages for health insurance will cover all the costs of the functioning of the healthcare system and must finally start regularly paying contributions from the budget to the Croatian Health Insurance Fund (HZZO) for all categories of citizens for which it has committed to do so. It has not complied with this obligation for years.
The experience of the pandemic has additionally confirmed the importance of the sound management of the public healthcare system without which it is not possible, in extraordinary circumstances, adequately to ensure the performance of regular work. In order for this to be possible, it is necessary to invest in the system in terms of staff which, through stimulating good working conditions and the appropriate valuation of the work of those who are employed in the sector, will guarantee sustainability even in such crisis situations as those arising in an epidemic.