Once covered, forever covered: The actuarial challenges of the Belgian private health insurance system
(2019) Health Policy — Vol. 123, n° 10, p. 970-975 (2019)
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- Authors
Hanbali, Hamza 
- Abstract
- tThe Belgian Law of 20 July 2007 has drastically changed the Belgian private health insurance sector bymaking individual contracts lifelong with the technical basis (i.e. actuarial assumptions) fixed at policyissue. The goal of the Law is to ensure the accessibility to supplementary health coverage in order toprotect policyholders from discrimination and exclusion, essentially when these operate on the basis ofage. Due to the unpredictable nature of medical inflation risk and the difficulty to model future increasesof health claims, the legislator introduced medical indices together with a specific updating mechanism,which aim at establishing standardized and fair premium adjustments across the sector. This paperconsiders two major issues of the current Belgian system. The first one is related to the transferability ofthe reserves, whereas the second one is related to age-discrimination. We discuss these issues and theirinterplay, and we address the conflict between the goal of the Law and the practical problems arising inthe light of the actuarial techniques.
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Citations
Hanbali, H., Claassens, H., Denuit, M., Dhaene, J., & Trufin, J. (2019). Once covered, forever covered: The actuarial challenges of the Belgian private health insurance system. Health Policy, 123(10), 970-975. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2019.07.005 (Original work published 2019)