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Slovenia - Private Health Insurance Companies: Innovative Benefits
In Slovenia, there are three private health insurance providers. None of them offers innovative benefits such as genetic testing, smart implants or personalized medications.
HELPFUL FINDINGS — HEALTH INSURANCE IN SLOVENIA
- In Slovenia, health insurance is provided by the government (specifically, the Zavod za zdravstveno zavarovanje Slovenije).
- Supplementary health insurance, which needs to be accompanied by governmental health insurance, is provided by independent insurance companies: Triglav, Vzajemna and Adriatic Slovenica. None of these companies offers innovative benefits.
- Triglav health insurance limits its offerings to healthcare cost reimbursements. This is also the case when it comes to Adriatic Slovenica. Vzajemna offers cost reimbursements for medical technology and prescription drugs, among other things.
- These three insurance providers are also offering faster access to healthcare services.
- The Slovenian government is planning to introduce a new fund intended for cost reimbursement of medicinal devices not covered by health insurance.
- In Slovenia, genetic testing is not provided or covered by health insurance.
RESEARCH STRATEGY
Private health insurance companies that offer innovative benefits couldn't be found. In Slovenia, only three private health insurance companies exist, and none of them offer these benefits. Here is how the research was conducted:
To start the search, local news sources that often report on the topic of local healthcare, such as 24ur.com and Delo, were searched with intentions of finding news reports on innovative health insurance options. Here, we made an assumption that the innovative options are most likely to be introduced as of recently, which means local news sources could have reported on the topic. What we kept finding this way were reports on the recently announced increase in supplementary health insurance prices, but features of private health insurance policies weren't mentioned. It was found that cancer testing isn't provided by health insurance in Slovenia.
We turned to searching for mentions of innovative private health insurance policy features by local experts in the industry, such as healthcare consultants (Nina Marin, Blanka Rihter, among others). We examined their publications, blogs, reports and other forms of public statements, hoping to locate mentions of innovative health insurance offerings. The idea was that these individuals likely know this information and might have directly mentioned innovative health insurance policy features, if they exist, but no relevant information was obtained this way. These individuals provided comprehensive descriptions of the local health insurance system. By examining these, it was evident none of the features in our interests were provided by health insurance companies.
Finally, we directly examined offerings from the three private health insurance providers: Vzajemna, Triglav and Adriatic Slovenica. In Slovenia, basic health insurance is exclusively provided by the government (Zavod za zdravstveno zavarovanje Slovenije), while supplementary health insurance is provided by private, independent insurance companies (Triglav, Adriatic Slovenica and Vzajemna). We examined health insurance offerings from these three companies and found that the providers provide cost reimbursement for medicinal implants, devices and prescription medications, among other things, but they don't provide these benefits themselves. These benefits were not emphasized as innovative, but rather described as basic features of the policies.