Young ‘priced out’ of health insurance
As many as 80,000 people are expected to abandon their health insurance this year with as many as 100,000 people likely to follow suit next year.
With as many as 200 people dropping their health cover each day, mostly in the 20 to 29-year-old age bracket, some of the insurers speaking at yesterday’s joint Oireachtas health committee meeting said solutions needed to be found.
Senior representatives of VHI, Aviva, Laya, and Glo Health spoke at the meeting, with risk equalisation scheme, community rating, intergenerational solidarity and the promised universal system of health insurance being discussed.
VHI chief executive John O’Dwyer told the committee that a robust permanent risk equalisation scheme was essential to ensure that the risk is spread across the market. He said the taxpayer will have to put in more than €100m to fund the solvency of the insurer, while the committee also heard that there is currently €104m unaccounted for in the insurance system due primarily to public hospitals taking up to six months to submit documentation to the insurers after carrying out procedures.
A number of committee members expressed concern that younger people were no longer going to be able to afford rising premiums.
Just this week it emerged that families could have to pay up to an additional €300 when they renew their policies next year due to plans by insurers to raise premiums.
Jim Dowdall, chief executive of the latest entrant into the market, Glo Health, said the Government-imposed insurance levy meant €760 was added to the cost of insuring a family of four and in some cases was as much as 40% of the total cost of cover at a time when there was a 12% drop in the number of families with children taking out health insurance.
He suggested reducing or freezing the levy, removing the levy from children, and ensuring the risk equalisation bill which is due to come before the committee in the near future looks to include provisions that will make heath cover affordable across the whole of society, “and not penalise younger people from entering the market”.
Aviva Health CEO Sean Egan said the current situation was “a vicious circle”, with rising costs driving younger people out of the market, leaving older and sicker clients and creating greater pressure on the public health system.
Donal Clancy, managing director of Laya healthcare, said there had been “very little engagement” from the Department of Health on the issues affecting the sector.
