The Director General of Health Insurance Thomas Fatôme assured Friday that Health Insurance “did not disengage” from dental care, even if complementary health will have to assume a greater part of the reimbursement of these.
Thursday, the government informed the complementary insurers that the coverage of dental care by the Health Insurance would drop from 70% to 60% from October 1st.
Complementary insurers will have to increase their coverage due to competition, so that the change is transparent for the user, at least initially. The transfer will cost them 500 million euros in a full year, and they have warned that they will probably have to increase contributions to cope with this new charge.
Reimburse more frequent preventive examinations
For the Director General of the National Health Insurance Fund, the transfer is part of a broader discussion on the management of preventive dental care.
We are ready to invest more in this care within the framework of the new convention of discussion with the dental surgeons, he said. The Health Insurance would thus like to reimburse more frequent preventive examinations, in particular for children and young people. She thus wants to propose the reimbursement of acts of prevention which are not reimbursed today, he said.
It’s not small, we are talking about potentially hundreds of millions of euros, said Mr. Fatme. Complementary insurers knew since the vote on the social security financing bill that they would have assumed a transfer of expenses from Health Insurance during the year 2023. But this transfer of expenses was valued at 300 million euros, and not 500 million euros.