Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 15 January 2014
828. Deputy Michael Healy-Rae asked the Minister for Health the reason for his proposals to introduce a loyalty bonus for long-standing customers with regard to health insurance; if this will increase the cost and penalise older people by making them pay a higher annual premium; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [1101/14]
View answerI am supportive of the concept of Lifetime Community Rating (LCR) as a potential means of helping to address decreasing membership of the private health insurance market. The introduction of LCR, rather than being considered as a loyalty bonus for long standing customers, could perhaps be used as a mechanism to discourage people from only taking out private health insurance as they get older (by allowing commercial insurers to charge higher premiums to “late entrants” to the market) and thus provide an incentive for people to take out private health insurance at a younger age. This is important as the health insurance market requires a sizeable cohort of younger members, who are generally healthier, to offset the high cost of older and less healthy members, which is critical to the sustainability of our system of community-rated health insurance.
It is not possible at this point to quantify the financial implications arising from the introduction of late entrant loading. There are a number of technical issues which have to be further considered, such as the age at which premium loading should commence and the rate at which loading should apply. My Department is working on proposals to address these issues and, in conjunction with the Health Insurance Authority, will assess the full implications of introducing such a measure to the Irish health insurance market.
