Insured persons in the statutory health insurance companies will have to pay significantly more for their health insurance from January. The additional contribution increases and the contribution assessment limit is also raised – but your health insurance no longer has to tell you that. But we do.
The additional contributions in statutory health insurance will increase by 0.3 percentage points to 1.6 percent as of January 1, 2023. At the same time, the contribution assessment limit will be raised to EUR 59,850. Thus, employees with statutory insurance pay an average of 233 euros more per year, as the comparison portal Check24 has calculated.
The problem: The insurance companies no longer have to personally send all their customers a letter in January to inform them about the respective premium increase. Specifically, the obligation of health insurance companies to send a separate information letter in the event of a premium increase will be suspended until June 30, 2023. Every health insurance patient has to inform himself about his new contribution.
From January, the higher health insurance contribution will be deducted from the gross salary without being informed. The insured are responsible themselves. “At the moment when the contributions reach a record level, the most important possibility for those with statutory insurance to be informed transparently about their individual additional contribution is missing,” Daniel Güssow, Managing Director Statutory Health Insurance at Check24, puts it in a nutshell.
What customers should do: Check the current additional contribution of their health insurance company in January, for example in the health insurance comparison from FOCUS online (advertisement): If your health insurance company has increased its additional contribution to more than 1.6 percent, it is definitely worthwhile to use alternative health insurance companies to compare.
The previously obligatory information letter to the insured not only contained information about the contribution adjustments of the respective health insurance company, but also clearly highlighted the average additional contribution. It was possible to see at a glance whether your own checkout was more expensive than the competition – and whether you could save every month by switching. This transparency is gone. Check24 now warns of particularly strong price increases for insured persons: “The project provides an incentive for all statutory health insurance companies to immediately raise the contribution rate to the maximum possible level, since customers do not have to be informed individually about the adjustment.”
