Feedback 28 december 2021
Isn’t it time for customers to tackle Het Zilveren Kruis?
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The Zilveren Kruis has given its customers a compelling reason to reconsider whether they want to stay with this health insurer. It no longer reimburses practice nurses of general practitioners with a fixed amount, but on a claim basis. It has also been established that conversations between these support staff and patients should not last longer than half an hour. As a result, the position of these officials so important to general practices to be unsettled. This is what Het Zilveren Kruis is doing in the middle of a new peak of the corona crisis. This shows a certain blindness on the part of the management.
The Zilveren Kruis maintains an excellent reputation from the past. Once upon a time there was a dichotomy in health care. The lower paid were compulsorily insured with the health insurance fund. For example, anyone who was a turner at a shipyard, construction worker or printer did not have to worry about medical costs. They were covered. The employer deducted the premium when calculating the net wage and transferred it to the health insurance fund.
If your income exceeded a certain level, you fell outside the system and you had to take out health insurance yourself. You then became, as it was called, private. It was just like with houses: below a certain income you could – after a long wait – be eligible for a housing under the Act. Otherwise you were dependent on the free sector. The choice was wide and one of the suppliers was the Zilveren Kruis, an initiative from the organizationally gifted Woerden general practitioner Frans Schrijver. In 1949, this health insurance started as a non-profit foundation. This allowed the premiums to remain low, argued Dr. Schrijver.
When women wanted to poke each other’s eyes out, they said: “My son is private”, but surpassing all was the announcement: “My son has had surgery. Of course he was in class”. He would then have been given a separate room in the hospital because of his status as a private individual. The fund-insured were in the hall. They had to join the doctor during the morning consultation hour. Individuals can make an appointment.
During the last decades of the twentieth century, this emphatic difference in status in health care has become increasingly blurred. In 2006 VVD minister Hans Hoogervorst the current system in. Since then, everyone is private, so to speak. Those who used to be in the health insurance fund and who were in danger of getting into trouble because of the high premiums received health care allowance. The traditional health insurance funds disappeared from the scene. The Silver Cross continued to exist. However, the tradition and spirit of founder Dr. Frans Schrijver have completely disappeared.
Nowadays Zilveren Kruis is a brand of BV Achmea, the largest insurance company in the Netherlands, alongside Interpolis and Centraal Beheer. According to your own website it is a multinational with a turnover of 20 billion euros in 2020 and a result of 630 million. Rabobank owns 30 percent and Vereniging Achmea 64 percent. Name task first this association “ensure that the company remains financially healthy and adds value in the short and long term”. They also look after the interests of the millions of ‘customer members’, because anyone who starts something with Achmea becomes a so-called member.
Democracy does not immediately reign supreme: voting members are appointed by the board. The fact that customers are sometimes lost sight of is apparent from the fact that Achmea was able to sell 800,000 usury policies without the association intervening. In 2020, the judge called that unjust enrichment. The victims must be compensated.
It goes without saying: the attack by Het Zilveren Kruis on the practice nurses of the general practitioners is not an industrial accident but a business decision that clearly illustrates the mentality of parent company Achmea. It dares then to show off old ideals and a ‘cooperative background’ but it’s just a cunning earning machine.
Do you want to keep it going?
For the rest, I am of the opinion that the subsidy scandal should not disappear from public attention, and neither should the Groningen natural gas affair.
listen The Memory Palace, the podcast by Han van der Horst and John Knieriem about politics and history.
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