My 5 year old son has a chronic condition which requires annual examinations.
As with every chronic condition and private health insurance in the Czech Republic – you can’t manage it through your health insurance provider, so we have to pay for all the examinations ourselves. And here is the unpleasant finding – it is absolutely legal to charge foreigners several times more for the usual examinations, actually it is up to the hospital how much it will ask you to pay. Yes, you got it right, there are 2 types of prices – Czech public health insurance companies pay the smallest one and foreigners from non-EU countries the greatest. From our practice: once we say we are Russian nationals seeking non-urgent outpatient services that our insurance company doesn’t cover – the price usually triples.
The math of managing my son’s megaureter is cruel – return tickets Prague-Moscow, a week’s stay and examinations in a top-notch Filatov’s Hospital still cost us less than going to a doctor in Prague.
But with the coronavirus outbreak we don’t have the fly back option any longer.
For the time we have been living here I have payed more than 350 000 czk in taxes for my public health insurance with VZP (that I barely use) and about 60 000 czk for my son’s private health insurance with PVZP. And my little one still is not entitled to the care he requires. If that isn’t discrimination – what is?