**4. The introduction and development of complementary health insurance**

Slovenia had historical experience with copayments since they existed already in the previous political and health system, which was in force until 1990. They were introduced in the early 1980s, mostly as flat rates on top of services. As the period of 1980s was marked by very high inflation rates, such an approach resulted in copayments becoming a negligible contribution (estimated only at around 1% of THE in 1989) as well as not an important burden on the patients. Still, this experience—together with the exceptions from copayments—fed directly into the solutions proposed by the new legislation adopted in 1992 [1, 10, 11].

When the legislation was being prepared in the period 1990−1992, different solutions to copayments were discussed. Considerations were given to the following options:


One of the important issues in the introduction of copayments in Slovenia, however, is the absence of capping. The latter would prevent chronic patients from incurring excessive expenditure simply due to their real health needs, related to the management of their existing conditions. In turn, this might have been also one of the contributing factors to high coverage by the CHI [1, 10, 11].

CHI gained popularity, acceptance, and advocacy with the introduction of copayments into the system in 1992 under the Health Care and Health Insurance Act [7]. However, the most important regulations chronologically presented in the market development of CHI are listed below (**Table 1**) [1, 10, 11]. CHI served to
