Health insurers' bundled packaging force Dutch to take out unneeded supplementary cover

Several health insurers in the Netherlands don’t allow consumers to choose supplementary insurance to cover a single type of healthcare. They only offer bundled packages covering both dental care and physiotherapy, for example. As a result, many consumers are forced to pay for insurance they don’t want or need, according to the Consumentenbond.

This year, the Consumentenbond found ten health insurers guilty of this forced bundled selling, including the big insurers Achmea, CZ, Menzis, and VGZ. Last year, there were only eight. Bundled selling is particularly prevalent in supplemnatary insurance for physiotherapy and dental care, the consumers association found.

At Interpolis, Menzis, and Zilveren Kruis, for example, consumers with the cheapest basic insurance can only get a supplementary package with both dental care and physiotherapy. If they want to only supplement their policy with dental care, they have to take out a more expensive basic insurance policy. At FBTO, for example, this type of mandatory bundling results in consumers paying €516 in premiums to receive €500 in reimbursement for dental costs.

“Due to bundled insurance, a group of consumers has been paying too much for their health insurance for years,” said Consumerenbond director Sandra Molenaar. "The Consumentenbond wants health insurers to stop mandatory bundled insurance. And to offer fair health insurance in the interest of consumers.”

The Netherlands Authority on Consumers’ and Markets (ACM) and the Dutch Healthcare Authority (NZa) have both previously criticized health insurers for this practice and urged them to stop bundling supplementary packages. “It's incomprehensible that health insurers simply ignore this call," Molenaar said.

The Consumentenbond has opened a hotline for people who, since 2021, had to take out a more expensive basic health insurance package to get the supplementary insurance they wanted, got stuck with a more expensive supplementary package to get the cover they needed, or decided against supplementary insurance and bore the costs themselves because of bundled insurance.

“We will investigate how many consumers have been affected by bundled insurance, how much damage they have suffered, and whether we can recover these costs from the health insurers,” Molenaar said.