Help me choose health insurance model

Don’t worry @Bojack, the insurance premiums for 2021 will be announced very soon. Historically they are announced at the end of September.

You will have time to rescind your contracts because the legal delay is 3 months if there is no change in premiums compared to the current year (what a joke, it never happened since the law passed in 1994), or 1 month if the premiums change (they always do, some exceptions may apply). In short, the media will talk about it ad nauseam, then you will have until Nov 30 to switch/change your insurance plan.

I don’t follow “media” and never saw any news about Prämien, and I live in Switzerland since 5 years. I only get nagged by cold callers and I always tell them something mean or just goodbye.

Assura is just black listed I not even look their insurance.
Too many bad reports even from internal Assura people.

When you need to pay it’s work nicely when you have a problem and need to be reimbursed can take long time or just refuse to reimburse. May be not for all people but too much for ignore :slight_smile:

Sometime pay 20.-/months more for go in another company can be more cheaper :slight_smile:
I change almost each year without using so can really tell you what is the best but calling option is nice. Cheaper and can choose directly your doctor or specialist for your problem. If you need to go family doctor for send you to another it’s just lost money and time.

1 Like

Related to insurance premiums - did you see this, just in?

The real solution would be 1 public health insurance for the mandatory part. I still don’t get why we need 50 different companies for the exact same thing. And then probably maximum cost limit per human. One human being shouldn’t be worth more than 1-2 million.

I know this sounds extreme. But with the rising of those customized treatments that cost millions the total costs will just keep exploding.

Assura seems to be unfairly bashed. My grandfather of 98 with multiple health problems has never had an issue in getting reimbursement or anything. He even joined the mandatory insurance when he was like 89 and they simply accepted him with no fuss
I know, I know anecdotal etc etc. But is good to highlight the positive sometimes.

Ever heard about this funny thing called free market? Not possible with a monopoly.

If you want lower prices, you should look for more free market, not less. It’s a complex topic, I don’t know the solution. But what I find strange is that I can go to any place and they don’t tell me the price. And many things have a fixed price, regardless of quality, there is this TARMED.

1 Like

Yeah I kinda like the Swiss system, but in practice it’s more expensive than single payer systems (but not sure how much is due to higher cost of labor).

Since Cortana was referring to mandatory health insurance…

How is it a free market if all “competitors” are required to offer the same product?

In most aspects it seems the worst of both worlds: Companies are spending great sums of marketing money try woo away customers from competitor’s to an identical product. And a fragmented market with many suppliers creates administrative overhead manyfold and makes it costly if not impossible to tap into synergy potentials and benefit from economies of scale.

3 Likes

Yeah guys let’s not talk randomly here.

  1. Basic Health insurance is compulsory on both sides, which mean that as a swiss, I can go to live in Micronesia for 50years, get a heart attack (touch wood) and get flown back here for surgery and any company must accept me. They might be slow to pay, but I don’t see how anything else might change apart for the insurances like “first call here” etc… They might penalize you, but they still pay something.

  2. The cost of having several health insurances has been calculated. It’s below 5%, I don’t remember it correctly. Consider it a way of creaing jobs.

  3. How was the saying…Where someone is pointing is finger at a problem and everyone is watching the finger.
    Stop complaining that the health insurances are too expensive! The costs come from some mf that ask 2500chf for an epipen (medicaments are too expensive) and the lions’ share of it all: doctors.

Just let make a guess game to see how much it costs a transportation by ambulance. It doesn’t matter how much. Let’s say 10meters. If you say less than 2500chf you are wrong (last I’ve heard that).

Say what you want but I think the problems are not the insurances.

Side note: have you ever seen surgeries on animals? I always wondered why animal can be opened and cut so easily but people not. (yes I know…we care more for people etc etc)

2 Likes

It’s not free market, sure! And it should be. But the product is not all the same, the different partners and chains provide for some variety.

Vets are a good example, eg in Poland. As a human, you need to wait months for some specialist diagnosis or surgery. Whereas I can take my dog today to a vet and two days later the dog can have the surgery. It’s because the vet market is more liberal. Sure, the restrictions are in place to protect us, but it’s worth considering if they really do.

image

Edit, they are a bit of…idiots there though. They blocked THE WHOLE site for that important info. So if you now want to get the links with all the other useful information, you have to wait. :man_facepalming:

1 Like

I concur with @ma0. Even if there are cost savings to be had from not having multiple companies (and this is not guaranteed), it is not the reason for rising costs.

Personally for me, health care costs are still reasonable in Switzerland. But, I am used to American costs. Atleast, you do get very good care when needed.

If you keep your residency in Switzerland and pay your yearly health insurance premiums in Switzerland, you could. Though the premiums would amount to a lot over 50 years.

I’d guess you’ve read too much horror stories of extreme incidences and would contend that it costs considerably less, on average.

And that’s at least educated a guess.

It’s so liberal a market that other dogs are regularly euthanised due to their owners being unwilling or unable to bear costs of surgery.

Even if it’s not the reason for rising costs, it could be (or is) a gigantic waste.

Rough figures:
Total spend on health is approximately 80 billion CHF - or about 12% of GDP.
That’s about 10’000 CHF per person per year.
About a third of that is covered by mandatory health insurance.

Percent based on what?

From the way you frame it, I’d assume it’s at least 1%.
That’d still be 800 million CHF a year of total spend or 280 million CHF of mandatory health insurance.

Your way of thinking doesn’t seem very frugal or mustachian :wink:

And only a small percentage of that can (potentially) be attributed to inefficiencies rising from having multiple companies. Keep in mind that having a single company can also very easily lead to inefficiencies, especially in the long term. Right now customers can keep them honest by giving reviews and switching based on costs. When there is only a single state mandated institution, it can very easily get bloated and also lead to worse customer satisfaction.

My point is that it is not going to in any way solve the main issue of annual rising costs.

…and you are not swiss. If you are a swiss citizen is different.

I think you are right. It should be between 800-1900
Wer bezahlt die Ambulanz in der Schweiz? - SWI swissinfo.ch.

The sad part is that 99.99% of the articles on internet talks about who pays what and not why they cost like that.

I’m not defending the Health insurances, I’m just saying that they are the low hanging fruit to blame but they are in fact just middlemen.

Sorry but I can’t find the info anymore. Google has become so shitty with their word guessing. Whenever I try to find anything, I just get pages about budgeting or changing insurance :frowning:
It starts with this:
Eidgenössische Volksinitiative ‘Für eine soziale Einheitskrankenkasse’
When there was the voting, numbers came out and it was clear that just by unifying all of them we wouldn’t save much.

1 Like

For a healthy mustachian I would only go for the cheapest which is Assura with their AssurCall model as in theory for the obligatory insurance there should be no differences (except the monthly price). Then if the AssurCall model does not suit you for some reason (you prefer to see your doctor fist) simply chose the model which suits you among the cheapest insurer.

Btw @bojack I am still on Swica PHARMED since 3 years and regret now having paid like ~40 CHF/month more than with Assura for nothing… Never used it though so I can’t say anything more about it except that it is more expensive. I will change this year for the cheapest.

1 Like

Numbers are out…it seems Assura now cost 30chf more…

1 Like

I could save 100.- CHF/year by switching to Assura QualiMed (is that PharMed now?) but there are no available pharmacies listed in Zug…