Covid-19 will not necessarily drive up health insurance costs

A two-week stay in an intensive care bed in Switzerland costs around CHF120,000. Keystone / Anthony Anex

Health insurers should be able to cover the increased cost of the coronavirus pandemic without putting up premiums for customers, says the umbrella association for the sector in Switzerland. But this assumption is based on no further significant waves of infection.

Switzerland’s health insurance providers have combined reserves of around CHF8 billion ($8.2 billion). This stockpile should be enough to absorb extra costs from the pandemic so far, Santésuisse director Verena Nold told the SonntagsBlick newspaperExternal link. This sum corresponds to three or four months of premiums.

Nold said that insurers are more concerned with helping to cope with the pandemic than with looking after profits. The exact cost of Covid-19 to the healthcare system has yet to be worked out. Overall costs have risen 5% in the first three months of the year, compared to an average of 3-4% in the last 20 years.

One of the main extra costs of the pandemic is the increase in intensive care treatment, where a two to three week stay for a single patient costs around CHF120,000.

Research by the NZZ am Sonntag newspaperExternal link shows that there were 510 coronavirus patients in intensive care units (ICUs) on April 2 at the peak of the pandemic. Other ICU patients numbered 230 on this date.

That position has now been reversed, with 130 coronavirus patients in ICU compared to 600 patients with other conditions. This means that there have always been several hundred spare ICU beds available in Switzerland. The total number of ICU beds was raised from 1,300 to 1,500 as the pandemic progressed.

Santésuisse says insurers have adopted emergency plans to speed up the processing of claims and to conduct more consultations over video link. Nold says that one lesson to be learned is to better guarantee the supply of essential medical materials and to stock up more drugs in the country.

More than 30,000 people have so far been infected by Covid-19 in Switzerland, resulting in over 1,800 deaths.