June the 7th, 2023 – A huge number of Croatian residents, around 230,000 of them to be precise, are being asked to contact the Croatian Health Insurance Fund (HZZO) because they could lose their health insurance.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, the Law on Amendments to the Law on Compulsory Health Insurance from March 2023 stipulates that unemployed persons who aren’t registered as unemployed at the Croatian Employment Service (CES/HZZ) must report to the HZZO by June the 29th, or they’ll end up losing their health insurance, Lider reports.
Another law, another complication
From the entry into force of the Law on April the 1st until today, 57,493 Croatian residents have reported to HZZO, but there are 282,462 individuals who have health insurance based on their status as being unemployed, but aren’t currently registered as unemployed with the CES. Unemployed Croatian residents who don’t come to register with the CES as job seekers will have to report to their local HZZO branch every 90 days in order to maintain their insured status after June the 29th this year.
An attempt at bringing in some order
In this way, the powers that be want to bring some order to Croatian health insurance, since a large number of people have moved away from Croatia, are working abroad, and still have health insurance in Croatia on the basis of unemployment. According to the records of HZZO, there were 4,085,418 insured persons in Croatia on June the 5th, that is, about 200 thousand more than the number of actual inhabitants according to the last census.
There are 4102 foreigners among those insured in Croatia
According to the HZZO annual report from 2022, the highest number of Croatian residents with health insurance are employed – 1.67 million people, about 525 thousand are children under the age of 18, 95 thousand are students, and 282 thousand are unemployed people who aren’t on the labour market. On top of those figures, 116,000 are registered with the CES, 320,000 people have health insurance as members of a primary insurance policy holder’s family, there are 1.04 million pensioners, and there are about 40,000 people drawing foreign pensions.
The census has thrown the maths off
There are 45,000 Croatian residents in the category of ”other” insured persons, and another 7,500 persons are insured under the category of farmers. Among those insured persons, there are 4102 foreigners. If that HZZO report is compared with today, it is evident that the number of insured persons has decreased by as much as 63 thousand in just five months. Since it is very likely that the remaining 230,000 unemployed people will not come forward in the next 24 days, the number of insured persons will very likely decrease further soon.
