Health insurance - a luxury or a necessity?
9 August 2011 Reading: 2 min Views: 6 958
In Kazakhstan, health insurance is more a necessity than a luxury. Free medicine, on closer inspection, turns out to be either not free or not quite medicine.
Voluntary medical insurance (VMI) in Kazakhstan is more a necessity than a luxury. Unfortunately, free healthcare, on closer inspection, turns out to be either not free at all or not quite healthcare. The blogosphere is full of hundreds of indignant stories about "free" medical care where you have to "thank" nurses for every injection and doctors for every examination.
Because of this, more and more Kazakhstanis (for now, of course, mostly residents of large cities) prefer to pay once for a voluntary medical insurance policy and know exactly what medical care they can receive and to what extent.
However, choosing a VMI policy is far from easy. Before buying one, you need to carefully analyse as many offers as possible. Yet you may feel like giving up after the first dozen: budget options are designed for perfectly healthy people. Since there are very few such people among those wishing to get insured, and a person who wants to conclude a contract and buy VMI is almost certainly not one of them, you will still have to look for a compromise between price and quality.
In Kazakhstan, a VMI policy covering basic services costs several tens of thousands of tenge. A VMI policy that covers treatment in good specialised clinics and includes home doctor visits, emergency hospitalisation, dental care and private ambulance services will cost you no less than 85 thousand tenge. And it will most likely include limits on the number of visits to certain specialists, as well as a strictly defined number of various tests, procedures and examinations. Some of them, including the most expensive ones, you will probably have to approve in advance with the insurance company. Offers with many such restrictions are found at almost every insurance company.
Incidentally, you can save money by buying VMI "in bulk" from one company. Groups of ten to fifteen people (roughly three families) may well be offered a discount, and the contract can also be concluded in the name of a legal entity, since most companies have stopped insuring individuals.
Nevertheless, experts recommend seeking advice from insurance brokers and agents listed in the Association's registry.
