Health insurance suddenly displaces asylum, housing as main theme in latest debate
Where previous election debates were dominated by topics like asylum seekers and the housing market, healthcare suddenly became a major point of discussion in the RTL debate on Sunday. Multiple parties want to stop adding new and expensive treatments to the basic health insurance to cut healthcare costs, but patient organizations warned that this would result in good healthcare only being available to those who can pay for it.
Healthcare costs are rising rapidly to the point that, if nothing is done, the average family will spend half its income on healthcare by 2040, according to NOS. Parties like the D66, VVD, ChristenUnie, SGP, Volt, and JA21 want to “freeze” the basic health insurance package, meaning that new and expensive treatments will no longer be automatically added. The CDA’s election program also has cuts to the basic health insurance package.
The freeze will cut costs significantly, by up to 7 billion euros over a few years, the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) calculated. The parties want to use the money saved on healthcare to fund extra defense spending or climate measures, among other things. But patient organizations warned that this would mean only wealthy patients can get the latest treatments for cancer or rheumatoid arthritis.
GroenLinks-PvdA and SP do not want to cut the basic health insurance package at all, which means they expect to spend significantly more on healthcare in the coming years. To help curb costs, they want all medical specialists to become salaried employees, so that their incomes can be limited.
During the debate on Sunday, GroenLinks-PvdA leader Frans Timmermans accused D66 leader Rob Jetten of “lying” to voters about his plans for the basic health insurance package. Jetten said in the debate that new treatments or medications could be added, but the D66’s election program calls for a “freeze,” Timmermans pointed out.
A day after the debate, Jetten explained to NOS that the D66 doesn’t want to freeze the entire package, but rather the total costs. New and innovative treatments can be added, but then costs will have to be cut elsewhere. Jetten wants the National Healthcare Institute to critically examine which treatments are ineffective and could be eliminated. He mentioned inserting ear tubes in children who frequently suffer from ear infections and tongue-tie surgeries as examples.
“I truly believe that healthcare can occasionally be made smarter and cheaper, precisely to create room for better care and new medications and treatments,” Jetten said. “We, too, will be spending €9 billion more on healthcare in the coming years. Other parties will spend much more. But we also want to save money for other things, like smaller class sizes and the climate.”
None of the other parties advocating to “freeze” the basic health insurance package want new, successful treatments to be accessible only to those who can afford them out of pocket, either. So in practice, the basic health insurance package will still grow. It is, therefore, questionable whether the cuts the parties predict in their election programs will actually be achieved.
