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Hopefully housing prices have topped, but health insurance is expected to go up for quite some time still.

True, but that is NOT included in the official inflation numbers reported in Switzerland, which distorts the official view versus the reality experienced by people.

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Not sure if Switzerland does this, but other countries have been accused of tweaking the CPI basket for political reasons to give lower inflation numbers.

I did not know this until now. Indeed “Compulsory health insurance premiums are not included in the CPI because they are not part of consumption”

However “Health sector services (medical and hospital services, medication and dental care, etc) are consumed by households and are therefore included in the CPI.”

Assuming health insurance premiums are driven by healthcare costs (ignoring political interference and lag effects) I guess it should be captured over the long term(?)

Healthcare costs are driven by political interference.

Before moving to CH I had contracted expat insurance through Cigna Global at a rate one fifth of the mandatory CH health insurance.

Things could be a lot cheaper if it weren’t for state meddling.

And it had most probably a clause that in case of serious sickness, they will send you back home and you will fall back under your home country insurance… so not comparable.

Because private corporations have cheap healthcare in their mind, and not profit maximisation.

Mostly by the fact that drugs become more and more expensive (which makes 80% of the costs). I am not sure how it is handled in Switzerland, but drugs are much cheaper in Germany where the max. price for a drug is typically controlled by the state…
And again, tell me about a pharma company which reduced their prices…

Thanks for prompting me to search and find an explanation by the Federal Statistical Office (document in French and in German)

Health insurance premiums reflect both changes of prices for health services and changes of consumption by the population.
Even if the price of services remained constant, insurance premiums would increase as medical progress tends to result in higher costs through more and more complex exams and therapies.
CPI intends to measure price changes, and insurance premiums are not a good indicator of that.

So, the CPI indeed takes healthcare costs into account, but not to the full extent perceived by those paying mandatory health insurance premiums.

Inflation costs are very personal. The biggest for me has been childcare costs (which is unfortunately also my biggest cost) which, while already very expensive, have increased massively since 2020.

You could not be more wrong, please.

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I agree with your sentiment, but this 80% is a crazy number. Gesundheitsgüter below is drugs, if I understood the description correctly.

tell me about a anything company which reduces their prices… :neutral_face:

Yep that is correct, but a big chunk of hospitals (and other stuff is not paid via health insurance, but via taxes if I remember correctly. I am still looking for the right representation, bear with me please.

Roche, Novartis, Pfizer, Astellas, Takeda, Novo Nordisk etc etc.

Please read up „ Dreijährliche Preisüberprüfung“.

An its 11% not 80%: „ Es bleibt nach der Datenrevision ebenfalls dabei, dass der Anteil der Medikamente an den Gesundheitskosten seit über 10 Jahren konstant knapp unter 11% verläuft. Während die Gesundheitskosten zwischen 2010-2021 jährlich durchschnittlich um +3.1% gewachsen sind, ist das Wachstum der Medikamente im selben Zeitraum mit +2.8% nur unterdurchschnittlich.“

My bad then, I stay humbly corrected, I mixed something up.

No probem and sorry since this topic triggers me (obviously I‘m biased) :laughing:

Of course i can, don’t be shy feel free to send me a DM with all your questions :hugs: happy to share!

To be honest, I’ve also read that one of the biggest costs are medicaments. Sounds weird, but I’ve seen prices in germany.

Pet peeve of mine: Some costs pharmacies relieves should be illegal. :slight_smile:

Yes I agree - I got pissed off when I saw these two “checks” on some of my recipe-d drug pickups.

Basically for picking a box up from the drawer and asking if I have allergies, they charged me 8-10 CHF, twice (2nd time same exact medicine).
But all legal apparently.

Then I found this list, which I might consult going forward.


But we are going way off topic here :slight_smile: sorry

It really depends. Switzerland has an easier access (for pharmas putting their drugs in the market) ecosystem than many European countries, yet not as easy as the US, and more generous pricing, but there’s no free pricing. Perhaps semantics, but in Germany drug prices are definitely not “controlled by the state”, the state scores drugs’ added benefit vs what’s available now and leverages the score to get a discount, the manufacturer can take it or leave it. The German system is pretty tough, but so is France’s, Italy’s, the UK’s, Spain’s etc. Switzerland has a softer system, that’s for sure, but then again Dr visits cost a lot here, yet the healthcare (and insurance) system is stellar, and better than Germany’s in my opinion, I am unlucky enough to know!

The last ~25 years (to pick a round number) have seen tremendous advances in drugs, catalyzed by sequencing of the human genome, advances in genetics, crystallography, high-throughput screening and modelling. Many extraordinarily expensive (for healthcare systems) conditions are reaching a peak of costs now. But the drug costs will slowly but surely come down for the BIG buckets. Talk in pharma is we won’t see certain supermegablockbusters any time soon (think $20 billion/year drugs), the fact of the matter is that a lot of big diseases have gained fairly good solutions, to the benefit of patients and the sorrow of healthcare systems. Generics and biosimilars will continue bringing drug costs down by a lot.

A lot of solutions just starting out now (CRISPR, CAR-T) are phenomenally expensive but targeting niche/rare conditions. Being rolled out to more broad/common first world conditions (diabetes, heart failure, common cancers, liver, kidney disease, neurological diseases like MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s) won’t be so easy in my opinion, but once the proof of concept and longer-term safety are established it will happen. Then insurance/pension systems will need to deal with the “issue” of people living too long :stuck_out_tongue: (edit: we are probably lucky in Switzerland, given the Swiss are smart and realised sooner than other countries that putting the ownership and responsibility of pensions onto the individual relieves the public system from a HUGE headache, while rewarding those who do good planning, like us)

Just food for thought

source: work for pharma for 10+ years.

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18 posts were split to a new topic: Political debate on Health Care

I feel you. Finishing Kita for the youngest one, this summer, :slight_smile:

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