Health insurer

What it means

A health insurer collects contributions to public health insurance and pays for healthcare. In Slovakia the insured person chooses among the operating insurers, and the employer remits contributions to the one chosen.

Both the employee, through a deduction from gross pay, and the employer on top of it pay contributions, as with the Social Insurance Agency. Rates and special cases are set by the Health Insurance Act.

People with no income are insured under public health insurance too; for some groups, such as pensioners or students, the state pays the contributions. The employer is therefore responsible only for the period someone works for it, and at the start and end of the employment relationship it must report exact dates to the insurer so that payers neither overlap nor leave a gap.

How it works in practice

The monthly cycle: register the employee, file the monthly advance statement, pay on time, deregister on termination. An employee changing insurer notifies the employer, and it flows into the payroll record.

After the year end the insurer performs an annual reconciliation of contributions, which can produce an overpayment or an underpayment. Not to be confused with the annual reconciliation of tax advances, which the employer performs and which concerns tax, not contributions.

A self-employed person pays health insurance advances directly, and their amount can change after the insurer’s annual reconciliation. When a client is also an employee alongside the trade, we track both roles at once: the employer remits contributions from pay, the business income is added, and the difference is settled in the annual reconciliation.

What to watch out for

An unregistered employee means unpaid healthcare and a penalty for the employer. Watch multiple concurrent incomes and people on work agreements too - the assessment base follows rules that differ from social insurance.

A mistake in a statement is not fixed by next month’s one. A wrong assessment base or an incorrect start date means a corrective statement and late payment interest on the shortfall, which the insurer calculates retrospectively. With several employees small differences pile up and only surface at the annual reconciliation.