Hi forum,

Sincewe are from a poor country, money means alot to us, so please be
understanding if some of you find our problems just tiny.

Bad Progress.ch
My wife is working for a large multi-national as a research assistant
/ PhD student, she said she is "forced" to buy a Health Insurance from
Progres.ch, this is an incredibly bad health insurance contract since
she has to pay 246CHF/month in 2006, and will have to pay 256CHF/month
in 2007, for an insurance whose franchise is around 2000CHF.

Good Assistance-Etudiants
That's really really bad in comparing with another Health Insurance
namely http://www.assistance-etudiants.com, where she has to pay only
45 Eu (~75CHF/month), with 100% reimbursement for normal cases and with NO FRANCHISE. The only drawback is that
after visiting a doctor, she has to pay the bill, and send the payment
proof (i.e. that recept from that bill) to Assistant-Etudiant in Paris
to receive the reimbursement.

Other cheap student insurances
Many other cheap insurances are explained here
http://www.englishforum.ch/insurance...-students.html


My questions are:
- I don't know why this large multi-national can force its employees to buy Progres.ch with such expensive insurance
- Now my wife has double insurance, and wants to cancel one. HOW TO ?
We have asked to cancel Progres.ch, and in the meantime we have bought
Assistance-Etudiants for one year (thus 540 Eu/year). But now
Progres.ch replied that my wife cannot cancle Progres.ch, this means
my wife has double insurance.

Thanks for your spending time with me. If you wanna have more
information on the insurance conditions of those 2 kinds of insurance,
please let me know.

One answer so far from someone is: you needed to quit your insurance 3 or more months ago; you might have problems to get out of this.

Thanks for that answer, can I have more detailed explanation ?
Thakns

Hope you´ve received your answer already but if not there were some discussions about cancelling insurance on the forum in the last month or two (sorry can´t find the exact threads). I´m not in CH yet but what I´ve gathered from reading here is that there are only certain times in the year when you can cancel your insurance. I can´t advise you further, sorry, but the answers are here somewhere maybe search for threads that jenny or richard have contributed to.

You also have to make sure that assistance etudiant is valid in Switzerland. This seems to be a French insurance company, which is not necessarily an acceptable option in Switzerland.

As for canceling: What reason did the other company give? You have to check your contract about how to cancel you policy. Of course, you wife must ask her company why they are "forcing" her to use thier insurance provider.



I would be interested to know the outcome. Please keep us updated.

This is an interesting question. I think too that you need to check whether that company offers valid health insurance for Switzerland. My guess is that it won't cover Swiss residents.

The other thing is that that price quoted for progres is rather higher than what they are offering on the open market, which seems odd. Check out www.comparis.ch to see what they, and other companies, are offering there.

My employer gave me an 'offer' of health insurance through a particular company, but I was not forced to accept it. I don't think they can force you - but I could be wrong about that. My employer does deal with the accident insurance directly though, but that's quite cheap.

Good luck!

The figures you are being quoted by Progres are normal, so its not really fair to claim this is a "bad" policy, as it is actually very competitive.

The other cheap scheme is probably limited to students or subsidised in some way ?

dave

Sorry to be the bearer of bad new but it looks like you can only change your insurer on two dates in the year, and you've just missed one. See this webpage:

http://www.comparis.ch/krankenkassen...sel_kuendigung

Sorry about that!

I'm with Progres as well, and I pay pretty much the same for my wife and I, so the prices aren't unusually high at all. Though, student insurance I know nothing about.

There's all that risk of when you fall off the wall drunk, and smash your head or smoke too much and think that you can fly... the rest of us have to cope with a real job

dave

You can't refuse Progress insurance, you have to use that until the end of your contract with Progress. What you should do is to write a letter to stop using Progress 3 months before the end of the contract.

Well I get a quote of 204.60 from comparis.ch for progres, which is a little less. I agree though that the price here is not excessive. You could certainly find a more expensive firm!