**6. Health policy and complementary health insurance**

CHI has remained one of the main focuses of health policy in Slovenia since its introduction. As much as it has been praised at its introduction and as much as it has been criticized all along the way, no government so far was able to significantly modify it in either way (e.g., either abolishing it or turning it into a more extensive mixed mutual health insurance). The first serious and organized attempt had been done with the Health Reform proposal published in 2003 [39].

According to that initiative and reform, the CHI would be entirely integrated into the compulsory health insurance and would thus cease to exist. After a fierce debate and controversies within the government itself, it was not implemented. There were two more attempts, which were systematically carried out by the Government, more precisely by the MoH. The first of the two was the initiative of the MoH in 2012 to seek reconstruction of this insurance and explore the possibility of it extending its scope. A policy dialogue was organised together with the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (Observatory). It resulted in the conclusions of not liberalising the market of these insurance and not extending their role to additional services, for example, long-term care. Finally, in the MoH term between 2014 and 2018, the minister was focused strongly on transforming the CHI into parallel compulsory insurance, which would be stratified in contributions by the income brackets, established by the IRS. This initiative ran close to its completion, but there were significant reserves. One of the important ones was in the report commissioned by the MoH to the Observatory and WHO, where the main conclusion was that the CHI contributed to the stabilisation of health financing in the times of austerity and shortages in public funding (see also above and [40]).

Remaining at very high levels of coverage and effectively covering around 83% of the total population and around 95% of those who are obliged to pay copayments it represents an important instrument for raising additional financial resources and collecting them in a transgenerational manner. The latter is the main factor why the CHI remains an asset and not a burden for the decision- and policymakers.
