Private healthcare in Paradise again

I have written about private health care services working from tax paradises. A trustworthy friend recently told me of another “tax paradise” these people are using. He (let’s call him Anders) runs a small company and some of his staff are employed part-time from employment agency companies. When he employs a new person Anders must have a health insurance for them. That is the law and they have to buy this from a private the health care center. The new part time worker is normally working for several companies and each one has a separate health insurance policy. Anders does not want to pay unnecessary costs if that person is already covered. Building workers today have a passport showing clearly that they are tax registered and covered by this compulsory health insurance. But other part-time groups of workers do not benefit from this passport arrangement. When Anders tried to identify if a part time worker is covered, the normal response from the workers trade union or employers union is “Don’t worry – Kela covers most of your costs!”. The second thing is that he is regularly invoiced for a 60 minute visits from these workers by the private health care companies even though the staff member was only there for 10 minutes. And of course, his complaints are met with “Don’t worry – Kela covers most of your costs!”

In any event, small companies are being penalized since they end up paying too much and then have to wait a year for the partial refund from Kela. More seriously, taxpayers, through Kela, are forking out larger amounts of money for compulsory private health care services that can now afford to pay more for doctors and nurses, while the public health care system is not working well because there is a lack of doctors and nurses with longer and longer queues.