Online health insurance comparators offered by private sites are widely promoted on search engines, such as Google. However, these rankings are not very transparent and do not automatically show all of the existing offers. It is therefore necessary to dig around to find the best offer.
Once the comparator has been found, it is necessary to activate a very discreet option to perform a complete comparison, often through a drop-down menu or advanced settings. The standard model, which appears automatically, only displays insurance companies that have agreed to be included. This lack of transparency can often hide an advantageous offer for the insured.
On Comparis.ch — one of the largest sites of its kind — only a dozen insurance companies are highlighted in the basic ranking, either through direct advertising or through a link that directly allows you to request an offer.
Commercial interest
For Felix Schneuwly, specialist in the field at Comparis, this is not a deception for Internet users. “We’ve always done it like this and people are used to it. They know what we see and what we don’t see on the site,” he explains in La Matinale on Tuesday. He adds that Internet users choose this comparator to find an offer easily and quickly.
In reality, most private comparators are also brokerage sites and receive commissions for any new contract placed via their site.
In recent years, Comparis has achieved annual turnover from LAMAL of between 6 and 10 million francs.
Will of certain insurers
Some insurance companies prefer to give up this exposure on comparators, which may seem contradictory to the logic of competition. One of their motivation may be to avoid too rapid growth in their number of insured persons in the LAMAL. Several small funds have long shunned the promotion offered by private comparators.
Concordia, the fund which recorded the greatest number of new LAMAL policyholders last year according to Comparis, has also partially waived it. Its offers were highlighted on Comparis from 2021 to 2023, but the insurer decided to abandon them in 2024.
Concordia says it is “very attentive to the growth of its customer base” and explains this choice by three basic reasons: maintaining its good financial health, the risk of overloading its customer service and the sufficient gain of new policyholders thanks to its own commercial services.
Risks incurred
Concordia, on the other hand, is well highlighted in the basic version of other comparison sites, such as Bonus.ch. With offers for all French-speaking cantons, except Fribourg. Concordia says it has “renounced this additional online release” due to the very high demand in this canton.
Between marketing and discretion, insurers have significant room for maneuver. The Federal Office of Public Health indicates (FOPH) that advertising management is one of the only measures that allows a fund to influence its number of policyholders. Still according to the OFSP, “too much change can sometimes represent a risk, in particular for small insurers”.
According to Christophe Kaempf, spokesperson for the health insurance umbrella organization Santé Suisse, “each fund normally has an interest in growing, but too high growth can entail risks.”
This was for example the case “of KPT which had a very very strong increase of several hundred thousand policyholders who had arrived from one year to the next”, he illustrates. “Its competitors had supported it by lending it staff to be able to absorb this mass of new policyholders.”
Costly changes
According to the audit firm Deloitte, on average, around 8% of policyholders changed compulsory health insurance each year between 2013 and 2024.
These transfers also generate costs: 139 million identifiable francs in 2023, according to the OFSP, of which more than half for advertising and 46.5 million francs for commissions paid to third parties (including comparators).
The RTS comparator in partnership with the FRC as well as the site Priminfo.ch offer an exhaustive and transparent comparison.
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A health fund, whether it likes it or not, does not have the right to refuse an application for compulsory insurance. Changes for next year remain possible until the end of November 2024.
Julien Bangerter/juma
