Assura, as good as anyone but you usualy need to pay the bill then reclaim if it is simple doctor bill, hospital bills go directly to Assura
At the end of the day, the insurance company is a necessary evil, it is the doctor you should be more worried about, he is the only quality of service that is important !
Welcome to the forum. This has been discussed multiple times - using the search function on the top right corner can give you quite a lot of information about Assura and other companies!
P.s. I'm with Assura and I'm very happy.
its a bit of a mission to set it up with ebills if you dont speak german/french, however once its set up, it works really well.
that being said, i havent been sick once nor needed the doctor since i got here so...
Assura is basically fine if you are in general good health and incur relatively few medical-related costs over the course of the year. However, if you have a chronic condition or fall ill such that your annual healthcare costs are significant (beyond even the 10,000.- CHF limit), it's not so fun to be with them. I've spend what seems like days of my life trying to prepare bills we'd pre-paid in order to get reimbursed, and my doctors and the nurse I see all hate Assura as well. In one instance they refused to pay several bills for medical services that I was prescribed, and called up my doc to dispute the fact that they thought this treatment wasn't medically necessary. So they wasted her time and questioned her medical judgement in order to get out of having to reimburse me for the cost. She said (in her experience) they are the only insurers that routinely do this. She was also visibly happy when I told her that for 2015 I'd switched to one of the big name providers.
Assura is cheap because they make their profits from insuring healthy people with very few health costs, making them do all the payment up front, and even making the patient responsible for filling out their own paperwork for reimbursement. As soon as you become expensive for them, they are a lot less nice to work with.
But that said, my OH is a healthy person and has had no problems with being on Assura's 2500.- deductible insurance for years. He's never gone over the 2500.-, so we just directly pay the bills that come our way and that's the end of the story.
The main gripe I have with them is that they pay up very slowly. Apparently legally they're supposed to pay within 4 weeks of claims being submitted, but I on Friday (2 October) got the final elements of bills submitted on 15 August. So they're taking up to 6 weeks to process claims.
You have to pay all bills up front to the provider (doctor, pharmacy, etc.) and then claim back. With them taking long to reimburse, you need to be in a position to cope with that cashflowwise.
That said, I've had no problems dealing with them. They've dealt with phone calls and e-mails promptly (though finding a way to e-mail them is tricky).
Once more thank you all!