Supplementary health insurance with mutual status plans an average increase of 8.1% in their contributions in 2024, an increase not seen in years, according to a survey by the French Mutualité published on Tuesday.
The increase will be 7.3% on average for individual contracts, and 9.9% on average for compulsory collective contracts (subscribed by companies for their employees), according to figures from Mutualité, which brings together French mutual insurance companies. . The survey covers 38 mutual societies, which protect 18.7 million people in total. Mutual insurance companies are the largest family of supplementary health insurance (with 46% of benefits paid), ahead of insurers (nearly 35% of the market) and provident institutions (a little less than 20%).
“Unacceptable” increases
The government has been concerned for several weeks about the increases in contributions announced by complementary health insurance for 2024, and the risk of impact on purchasing power. The Minister of Health Aurélien Rousseau indicated on Friday that if we could “explain” increases “of 5 to 7%”, other increases already announced and going up to 12%, were “unacceptable”. The government cannot control the prices of supplementary health insurance and can only call on consumers and businesses to encourage competition.
According to the figures provided by the Mutuality, at least half of the mutual members remain within the framework of +5 to +7% mentioned by the Minister of Health. Half of the holders of an individual contract (subscribed by an individual) or collective contract (subscribed by a company for its employees) will have an increase of less than 6.9%, she argued. “Health spending was extremely dynamic in 2023,” explains Eric Chenut, president of Mutualité française. “The increase was +6% while we were expecting +3 or +4%.”
The increase is notably fueled by the revaluation of salaries and rates of caregivers, higher consumption of care, or the reduction in reimbursement of dental care by Social Security (from 70% of the rate to 60%). More structurally, “health spending has been increasing faster than the wealth produced” for years, underlines Mr. Chenut.
According to the president of the Mutualité, one of the solutions to try to avoid excessive increases in contributions could be to review the benchmark care basket, the “responsible and united contract”. This contract “embeds a very high level of definition of coverage, and therefore also a very high level of costs,” he says. It might be useful to “give it greater modularity” to “allow people to cover themselves at the level that is necessary for them”.