April the 3rd, 2023 - A considerable number of individuals, 300,000 of them to be more precise, could end up losing their Croatian health insurance as a new law is now in force.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, a new law will fully enable the Croatian Health Insurance Fund (Croatian: HZZO) to ''clean up'' the records it holds of insured persons from so-called "fictitious" insured persons. Many such people with ''fictitious'' insurance have now left Croatia, got a job abroad and actually no longer have the right to access public Croatian health insurance. According to estimates by the health administration, that figure could total around 300,000 insured persons, writes Novi list.
Amendments to the Law on Compulsory Health Insurance have now entered into force, which prescribe the obligation for insured persons to report to their local HZZO office in person if they have reached the age of eighteen, terminated their employment, or served military service or a prison sentence. In the case of an application to the employment office, such reporting to HZZO offices is not necessary.
The obligation to report in person to HZZO in order to check the circumstances on the basis of which their Croatian health insurance status was determined (if they aren't registered in the records of unemployed persons of the Croatian Employment Service) is prescribed by new legal provisions for everyone after the age of eighteen, after the end of the school year in which they finished their mandatory education or after passing their final exam, or after the termination of an employment relationship.
According to the new law, all those who have just served military service and prisoners (after having been released from an institution for the execution of criminal and misdemeanor sanctions), as well as from a health or other specialised institution, such as a secure psychiatric hospital, must also report to HZZO.
The aforementioned categories of insured persons must report in person to the nearest HZZO office within 90 days from the date of entry into force of the Act, i.e. no later than June the 29th, 2023. If they don't want to remain without any Croatian health insurance, they will still have the obligation to come to HZZO in person once every three months, except for the times during which their names can be found in the records of unemployed persons at the Croatian Employment Service.
Those who do not fulfill their obligation within the prescribed period, i.e. by the end of June this year, and after that once every three months, will simply be deregistered from compulsory Croatian health insurance ex officio, without issuing any kind of special decision.
According to the new legal provisions, insured persons who have registered a temporary departure outside of Croatia can retain their Croatian health insurance until the end of June at the latest, and HZZO will deregister them from compulsory health insurance ex officio at the end of that period, and as stated above, they'll do so without issuing a decision.
These are mainly emigrants who have now left Croatia and gone to work abroad in the last decade, and yet they have remained on the list of insured persons at HZZO and occasionally use healthcare services when in Croatia. At the beginning of 2022, a comparison of the number of inhabitants in the last population census and the number of people who hold Croatian health insurance showed that there are 200,000 more people insured through HZZO compared to the total number of inhabitants in Croatia.
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