Can I get health insurance policies from different Swiss insurance companies?

Right now I have three insurance policies from one Swiss insurance company: the obligatory health insurance, an outpatient insurance policy and a hospital insurance policy.

The reason for this is that the insurance representative I spoke to indicated that I could not get the two voluntary policies without have my basic health insurance with them as well.

Is that actually the case? I would like to keep my current outpaitent policy but could save a lot of money by trading my obligatory policy and hospital insurance for different policies from other insurers.

How does this actually work?

Greetings,

You have every right to get your compulsory health insurance and your supplemental insurance policies from different insurance companies.

Doing this can be a good financial move if, for example, one insurance provider offers low premiums for compulsory health insurance and another insurer provides exceptional benefits or pricing for a supplemental health insurance policy.

In the case of supplemental insurance policies, some insurers may only provide certain policies in combination with other supplemental policies. As long as that is not the case, you can take out supplementary policies from as many different insurance providers as you want.

For example, you could get outpatient insurance from one insurer and hospital insurance from another. This makes sense because no one insurer has the best coverage and pricing across the board.

However, there are a few things you should consider before taking out insurance policies from multiple insurance companies:

1. Insurance providers often offer multiple policy discounts to encourage you to take out all your health insurance policies with them. These discounts do not apply when you take out your various policies from different insurance providers.

2. You may have higher deductibles because some insurance providers use just one deductible for compulsory and (certain) supplementary insurance when you take out both policies from them.

3. Handling correspondence with more than one insurer can be time-consuming. You will also have to keep track of which bills should be covered by each insurer. In some cases you may need to send copies to more than one insurer (where part of a bill is covered by compulsory and part by supplemental insurance, for example).

4. Insurance companies are not obligated to provide supplemental health insurance policies to applicants (they are only obligated to provide compulsory health insurance). Only cancel your current supplementary policies if you have a guarantee of acceptance from another insurer.

Best regards from Moneyguru

More information:
Coverage provided by compulsory Swiss health insurance
Compulsory health insurance comparison
Supplemental health insurance comparison
Hospital insurance comparison