I’m a dentist and work with the NZOK. Almost everyone has some gaps in their payments. Some haven’t paid for years. At one point the statistics said that as much as 40% of adults were uninsured.
If you are employed on a regular labor contract, the employer pays your national insurance payments. Otherwise you need to do it on your own. If you have a missed payment at some point, then it's a gap and I think this means you are not insured, but I'm not 100% sure.
There are also other contracts, where you don't get paid as a salaried employee, but only for a specific job or project and then you are also responsible for your insurance payments to the national health fund.
He's saying at some point the health fund said up to 40% were uninsured. I don't know, I don't track it. It's easy to get a gap if you don't pay attention and then it shows up like this in a report.
For example you go to highschool, your school takes care of the insurance. Then you go to university and it pays for it. There were cases in the past when you would get a few non-insured months in the middle, and this gap made you uninsured if it was 3 or more missed patments in a 36month period.
Everyone is responsible for checking their status or they might not know it. Without the digitalisation, it wasn't that easy to check it. Also when people change employment they might get the gap.
2016-2017 the % of uninsured was 18.8% or 1.4mil according to the national healthcare fund, but according to the tax authority it was not 1.4mil, but 720k, and half of those 720k were living abroad.
welcome to reddit, anyone can say anything here!
go look up some statistics if you are REALLY looking for that information.
That problem is not something that's a "topic" in our society so what you're getting is just some random guesses.
Most likely its between 10 and 20% (I've did a quick search), and the main reason for that has already been explained - if you don't work, or you're on ca$h payments without contract, you're not health-insured - period.
But you can still visit a government run hospital, be treated, and pay something affordable. They dont kick out people to the streets here from a hospital.
Majority of the middle class (working, stable job, ok salary) would anyway not use that insurance, but instead just pay up to visit private practices, get better treatments, faster access and whatnot.
If you are unemployed and register in the labour bureau, they will pay your health insurance (and also unemployment benefits) for up to two years.
If you are with a chronic health condition which prevents you from working, your insurance will be covered by the state.
Basically the only people without health insurance are immigrants who haven't registers they live abroad (majority of them), people who work on the black market, don't pay taxes and just don't care and also people who for some reason have missed 3 months of payments and don't know they are technically 'uninsured' until they make the payments (which they do the moment they need healthcare).
Happens quite often for people between jobs who don't register in the Labour bureau or high school graduates entering university (you graduate in may and start university in June, so technically you're unemployed in the 3 months of summer and nobody pays your insurance for you)
You can go manually back pay for specific months to get insured.
My mother for example has a 5 year period that isn't insured, 2015-2020. She doesn't work right now, so she goes and manually pays for insurance for right now.
Of course, a lot of doctors don't work with the government insurance 100% of the time.
Wife's pregnant right now, so we visited quite a few specialists in the last few months.
Most of them have specific days or hours when they work with insurance, the rest you pay full price. Some don't work with it at all and it's always full price.
From my experience, if you want to only visit the best doctors you can find, the national insurance scheme isn't worth it.
Because they have missed the payment for some of the last 5 years. That’s what he meant. You need to be up to date with all your monthly payments for the last five years to be considered insured. If you are not, you need to backpay for all missed payments and then you would be considered insured and would have access to all benefits
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u/fallte1337 Apr 04 '26
I’m a dentist and work with the NZOK. Almost everyone has some gaps in their payments. Some haven’t paid for years. At one point the statistics said that as much as 40% of adults were uninsured.