Insurance boss sets out how to limit spiralling Swiss healthcare costs

Rising healthcare costs are a constant worry for many Swiss citizens. © Keystone / Gaetan Bally

Savings and special efforts must focus on medicines, hospital planning and the range of healthcare covered to limit rising health costs and insurance premiums, says Thomas Boyer, director of health insurer Groupe Mutuel. 

He calls for the creation of a task force with all stakeholders from the health sector including the cantons, the federal authorities, insurers, doctors, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, other healthcare providers and patients. “The different actors must stop passing the buck,” otherwise “nothing moves”, he told the Le Matin Dimanche and SonntagsBlick newspapers on Sunday.

The taskforce initiative must come from Bern, because parliament must validate the reforms, he notes. 

The arrival in the next few months of a new federal advisor in charge of health is “an opportunity to instill a new dynamic and build real compromises”, he adds.

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To combat rising costs, the Groupe Mutuel boss suggests taking short-term action on medicine costs, in particular to use more generics. In the medium term, Switzerland must review its approach in terms of hospital planning, he says.

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With 576 hospital sites, Switzerland has “the highest density in Europe, after France. It is far too much,” adds Boyer. “We need to group sites together and rethink the organisation of the system.” He recommends moving from cantonal hospital planning to supra-regional, or even centralised planning.

“In the longer term, a change of model is necessary,” says Boyer. It is not only necessary to act on prices, but also on the volume of services, according to him. “We must question the real effectiveness of each intervention and its usefulness for the patient […] We must be able to open up a reflection between what is necessary and what is comfortable.”

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