Survey: every eighth person in Lithuania has private health insurance

These were the results of a survey commissioned by Gjensidige and conducted by the polling company Spinter tyrimai.

“Health insurance is rapidly gaining popularity in Lithuania. On a year-on-year basis, within the first nine months of 2018, the market increased by nearly 30 per cent. A reason for this may be the ever-expanding spectrum of health-related services that insured employees can avail themselves of. We can also see that every year people devote more attention to strengthening their health and preventive measures” says Rimtas Vaitkunskas, Director of the Corporate Customers Department of Gjensidige.

According to the findings of the survey, nearly half of employees using the service are management level staff and specialists. “Turnover of high competence employees causes concern or may even inflict financial loss for any corporate owners. Therefore, employers are looking to motivate these employees the most”, said the insurance company representative.

According to the data available to Gjensidige, the most popular services in the health insurance package are in-patient treatment, dental services and pharmacy products. Currently rapidly gaining popularity are insurance packages with preventive treatment services promoting preventive health care checks. People appreciate innovations, such as electronic cards, as now clients do not have to carry their health cards. Another service that is becoming increasingly popular is internet self-service, allowing the activation of health insurance cards, reporting events and monitoring one’s health insurance information.

According to Rimtas Vaitkunskas, during recent years there have been significant changes in the size of the companies providing health insurance coverage for their employees. Earlier, health insurance for employees was mostly provided by major players in the sector, but increasingly more customers to the service are medium-size enterprises with 20-50 employees. Small business entities that several years ago were barely using the service are also rapidly catching up.

“The largest group of companies providing health insurance for their employees are IT, finance, logistics, production, sales, real estate, and service sector companies, while on the other hand, increasingly often employee health insurance services are requested by companies located in regions”, said the insurance company representative.

He also noted that employee health insurance is offered on identical terms for labourers and people in office jobs. “Clearly, the nature of the work a person performs may determine certain illnesses or traumas. But that is not necessarily a rule. For instance, both a labourer working with chemicals or an office employee may develop allergies, only for different reasons”, he said.

Notably, manufacturing and agriculture sector companies provide health insurance for both their office employees as well as for field or manufacturing workers. “There are cases where managers of companies do not acquire health insurance for themselves, as due to their financial standing they can independently use health services, but they very responsibly insure all their employees. Not infrequently, companies consider these services to be one of the most important incentives”, said Rimtas Vaitkunskas.