Insurers are usually flexible with people in difficulties but, if arrears continue for six months, customers are referred to the CVZ college of health insurers. Then the arrears are recovered directly from wages or benefits.

At present, there are over 300,000 people with compulsory repayment orders from the CVZ, up from 244,000 at the end of 2010. The government introduced the CVZ orders in an attempt to reduce the number of people in arrears. The attempt has failed.

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In 2008, Swedish ‘Anna’ went on holiday to the Greek island of Samos. On her last night she claimed to have been brutally raped and beaten, according to Sweden’s TV4.

After reporting the crime to authorities in Greece, she then went back to Sweden the day after the assault as planned.

Back in Sweden, she underwent a medical examination, after which the Swedish doctor found evidence corroborating her story.

Despite the findings of the Swedish medical team being forwarded to Greece, Anna learned in 2009 that the prosecutor on Samos would not pursue the case any further.

One of the reasons given for the case having been dropped was that it had become common for holidaying women, especially Scandinavians, to say that they had been raped during their stay in Greece to claim insurance money upon their return.

Anna resigned to trying to move on with her life.

But she was later contacted by a Greek public prosecution office, which informed her that she was being countersued for making false rape accusation and libel.

“I get this summons to appear in court. They’re suing me for libelling this man,” she told TV 4.

When Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) contacted a number of insurance companies in Sweden they found that there is no such thing as ‘rape insurance’.

Those that have been raped during holiday can claim recompense under a special clause in their home insurance, however.

But according to Daniel Claesson, head of information at Swedish insurance company If, they see very few cases like that.

“We see maybe one or two a year. And we haven’t noticed any increases over the last few years either,” he said to SvD.

At the Swedish embassy in Athens, they have heard the rumours about Swedish ‘rape insurance’ before.

A local paper in Crete, Xaniotika Nea, recently published an article with the headline ‘Rape as an industry to reap benefits’.

“The article may have kicked off a debate leading to this notion,” Kristina de Cornejo of the embassy told SvD.

In the article Stamatis Belivanis, a medical examiner, is quoted saying that it is common for Scandinavian tourists to take out a special insurance against rape in their home countries and later claim money when returning home from holiday.

“They come here on vacation and then a day or so before leaving, after having sexual relations with someone, they report a rape. Back home they try to claim on the insurance,” he said in the Greek paper.

“This is in no way a new phenomenon, it has just been intensified since the economic crisis hit the countries in question,” he was quoted saying.

The Nordic embassies in Greece took offence to the article and the doctor was made to apologise for the statements he had made. However, he added that they were only a reflection of the public opinion in the area.

Anna has been summoned to appear in court in May but she is not planning to attend.

“Not a chance,” she said to TV4.

“We don’t think she is at risk of being extradited, but you never know. The ball is now in the Greek court,” Gunilla von Wachtenfeldt, Anna’s victim representative, said to SvD.

Attempts by The Local to get comment on the matter from Greek organisations in Sweden were unsuccessful.

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Sweden’s new, tougher health insurance rules, which were adopted several years ago, have been the subject of near constant criticism and in response, the government launched a review of its reform efforts last autumn.

A memo is set to be circulated for comment shortly which is expected to lay the groundwork for a Riksdag decision scheduled for the autumn of 2011, social insurance minister Ulf Kristersson of the Moderate Party wrote in a debate article in the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper on Monday.

Representatives from the four centre-right governing parties who sit on the Riksdag’s social insurance committee also signed the article.

“Health insurance reforms have, for the most part, been successful,” the group writes.

“But not everything has been good and certain people have been put in a bind.”

Among other things, the proposed changes included increased scope for individual assessments of those who reach the outside limit of 2.5 years

If such people are so ill that it would be unreasonable to force them off health insurance benefits, they would be allowed to continue receiving payments.

The government also wants to increase economic security for those who leave time-limited disability pension payments, previously referred to as ‘early-retirement’ benefits (förtidspension).

People who go off health insurance payments but don’t qualify for sickness benefits (sjukpenning) because they had no previous income, should no longer be directed to basic welfare benefits, but would instead receive a new special benefit payment.

They would also be able to qualify for housing support payments.

Other proposed changes included earlier measures for rehabilitation, better coordination between the agencies involved, and that Sweden’s National Public Employment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen) receive money to create 3,000 new positions for people with reduced working capacity.

“Health insurance has always primarily been a transitional insurance aimed at returning people to work, according to their abilities,” the authors write.

“A society which high welfare ambitions must, at the same time, create clear requirements to utilise everyone capable of working to the extent possible.”

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But not for much longer – in Europe, at least. In a ruling issued on Tuesday, the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice, the European Union’s top court, banned insurance companies from using gender as a way to work out premiums. The case was brought by a Belgian consumer group which challenged differential pricing for men and women. The judges upheld the complaint, ruling that using statistics about differing life expectancies or road-accident records between the sexes to calculate car and health insurance and pension schemes breaches E.U. rules on equality.

The verdict, which applies from December 21 next year, cannot be appealed and is expected to drive overhauls in the insurance industry as providers bring the policies of men and women closer together – presumably by raising how much women pay and lowering rates for men. And it has already elicited howls of outrage. “This ruling is utter madness,” said Sajjad Karim, a British Conservative Member of the European Parliament. “Boy racers will now have even more money to buy unsafe fast cars, whilst safer drivers will be hit hard in their insurance premiums.” The CEA, the European insurance federation, said the verdict was “bad news,” arguing that the use of evidence-based statistics was “indispensable in actuarial science.” Meanwhile, The Association of British Insurers said the decision would actually reinforce price discrimination, with women drivers under 26 in the U.K. facing a 25% rise in car insurance rates, as rates for men in the same age group drop by 10%.

Statistics certainly make a compelling case for sex discrimination. A male driver under 21 is twice as likely to have an accident than a woman under 21, insurers say. In 2009, almost 76% of all road fatalities in the E.U. were male. And other statistics show that women in Europe will live around 6.5 years longer than men. Moreover, the development of the new discipline of “gender medicine” in places like Germany and Austria has shown that men and women are affected differently by the same diseases and react in different ways to the same medicine, and therefore need different treatments.

But that logic is rejected by Leanda Barrington-Leach, spokeswoman for the Brussels-based European Women’s Lobby, who says the issue is about what criteria to use to set premiums. “A black man may typically have a shorter life expectancy than a white man, but you could not use race as a factor to set his premium,” she says. “There are other factors that can and should be taken into account.”

Laurianne Krid, policy manager at FIA, which represents motoring clubs around the world, makes a similar argument to support Tuesday’s ruling. “Women are safer drivers statistically, but they should pay according to their real risk, which can be calculated objectively,” she says. “We want insurance to be based on criteria like type of vehicle, the age of the driver, how much you drive during the year, and how many accidents you have had.”

While insurers have warned that the ruling will lead to a premium price hike all round, Krid says this is scaremongering. “We don’t have any reason to believe this should result in a rise in premiums. Gender was only one factor in a pool of many criteria anyway,” she says, adding that nonetheless, there is a chance that unscrupulous insurers will simply re-price women’s rates upwards without lowering men’s rates.

But quite apart from the business implications for insurers, the ruling has a broader significance for E.U. equality legislation. Equality between men and women was enshrined in the European project from the beginning, but discrimination remains widespread. Despite out-performing their male counterparts academically, for example, European women still get lower pay and fewer top jobs.

Until now, discrimination in setting insurance rates has been allowed under E.U. rules, “if sex is a determining risk factor… substantiated by relevant and accurate actuarial and statistical data.” The question for the Court on Tuesday was whether the data justified such a distinction. On that issue, the judges relied heavily on a preliminary ruling issued last September by the Court’s advocate general, Juliane Kokott, who pointed to behavioral traits like smoking and drinking, participation in sports, and stress levels as better indicators of longevity. Indeed, Kokott argued that despite the wealth of statistics, there is nothing innate and biological about women that makes them live longer. And the Court agreed: for all the damning evidence of men behaving badly, gender can no longer play a part in how much someone pays for insurance.

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The demand is a direct challenge to the Swedish Trade Union Confederation(Landsorganisationen - LO) which considers unemployment insurance (arbetslöshetsförsäkring – A kassa) to be a union matter.

“It’s highly illogical that it is under union management, all the other social security insurances are state,” Björklund said to the Dagens Nyheter daily.

Björklund pointed out that the state currently meets two-thirds of the costs of unemployment insurance schemes.

The demand, which the party executive will consider at the weekend, is therefore likely to become an election issue.

The government, of which the Liberal Party is a member, recently set up a parliamentary inquiry into sickness and unemployment insurance, which is scheduled for completion by 2013. The Liberal Party has now indicated that it is reluctant to wait.

LO chief Wanja Lundby-Wedin has described the move an attack on the Swedish model. The unions want to retain control over the unemployment schemes as it means that most of those working in Sweden are obliged to join and thus become members of the union.

Björklund however dismisses this line of argument and states that Sweden has along and established tradition of union membership.

“I do not think the unions need to be worried, adding that he supports the collective bargaining model between strong partners in the labour market, while social insurances, except currently unemployment insurance funds, are matters for the state.”

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The £6.99 per person policy will reimburse passengers for costs for delays of more than 24 hours caused by closure of airspace.

Flybe said it stands by its commitment to reimbursement as laid out in EU regulations, but “wanted to make sure our passengers have insurance to help pay for any additional costs” from airspace shutdowns.

If passengers are stranded away from home, Flybe will pay for any reasonable unplanned-for costs incurred for additional accommodation and travel expenses up to £150 for each 24-hour period (maximum £1,050).

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The net profit, equivalent to 472 million dollars or 345 million euros, was well within the range of analysts’ expectations.

“Today, I am proud to say: we have come a long way,” said chief executive Stefan Lippe in a statement.

Lippe said the company had restored its capital base, which was severely eroded during the crisis, and strengthened its balance sheet.

Nonetheless, Swiss Re’s annual accounts suffered as it shed the risky investment policy that left a pillar of the global reinsurance industrytrembling more than a year ago.

Annual net profit was hit by impairments of some 2.0 billion francs mainly on securitised products and by mark-to-market losses of 1.9 billion francs on corporate bond hedges, Swiss Re said.

The group shifted from corporate credit hedging to government securities and high grade corporate bonds and “terminated substantially all of its exposures” to Credit Default Swaps (CDS), one of the financial instruments that was blamed for precipitating the banking collapse in 2008.

However, Swiss Re said it expected a “further significant reduction in the remaining legacy exposures in 2010.”

Last year’s turnaround was most marked in the fourth quarter of 2009, with a 403-million-franc net profit compared to a 1.7-billion-franc loss in the equivalent period a year earlier.

The group said its core reinsurance business had continued to prosper through the year, notably with a 39 percent increase in operating income from property and casualty reinsurance, which reached 3.8 billion francs.

“The strong fundamentals of our business underpin my confidence in the future,” said Lippe.

In 2008, Swiss Re posted its biggest ever loss of 864 million francs, largely due to investment losses.

That prompted the departure of chief executive officer Jacques Aigrain after he was widely blamed for having led the reinsurer into the risky world of investment banking, as the company turned to Wall Street sageWarren Buffett for fresh funds.

The only two other annual losses in the company’s history were posted following the 9/11 attacks in New York.

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People who don’t smoke and those who do sports and are not overweight should pay lower health insurance premiums the government is to be told.

To prevent the charges becoming too expensive for those on low earnings, the council will recommend that the basic health insurance premium should be income-related.

The council points to the fact that that over one-third of illness in the Netherlands is caused by unhealthy lifestyles. However, the major health insurance companies reject the idea of a range of premiums, saying such a system would be difficult to put into practice. They also argue that penalising unhealthy living risks making the Dutch health care system divisive.

Health Minister Ab Klink has already come out against higher premiums for unhelathy lifestyles.

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The government’s pay czar in charge of compensation at bailed-out companies, Kenneth Feinberg, said the payments were part of legally binding contracts that must be paid despite the outrageous nature of the bonuses.

“These are old grandfather contracts that have the legal force of law,” Mr Feinberg told Good Morning America today.

He said that the government was working to recoup part of the payments under agreements reached with AIG employees.

“We are making some progress,” he said. “I do not for a minute ignore the outrage out there which I share. But the fact of the matter is we’ve got to abide by the law, we’ve got to work as best we can to get as much of this money back as we can and frankly we are doing a very very good job I think in getting as much of this money as we can pursuant to the rule of law.”

The payments, confirmed by a source close to the matter, were part of a deal in which employees agreed to accept less than they were owed in exchange for early payouts, in an effort to stem the outrage that occured last year.

US officials have argued that the government was unable to stop the legally binding payments to the employees at the troubled Financial Products division that nearly sank AIG after a meltdown in the US housing market.

Nonetheless, news of the latest bonuses triggered fresh criticism of the administration in view of the massive bailout of AIG worth more than $US180 billion dollars.

Republican Senator Charles Grassley said of the latest bonuses, “AIG has taxpayers over a barrel. The Obama administration has been outmaneuvered”.

American International Group, rescued in the face of a threatened financial system meltdown in September 2008, said that around 97 per cent of employees with its troubled Financial Products division “have volunteered to reduce their upcoming 2010 payment”.

The moves will help achieve the company’s “giveback target” of reduced bonus payments in an effort to stem the type of blistering criticism that erupted a year ago.

The company owes about $US198 million in bonus payments, according to government officials.

“We have decided to begin these reduced payments to these active employees as well as those nonactive employees who agreed to reductions,” AIG said. “The reductions from these two groups stand at about 20 million, and we believe this allows us to largely put this matter behind us.”

About 200 active and former employees will receive the early payments, which were available only to those who agreed to a cut.

The company said that some former employees volunteered to reduce payments by an additional $US4.5 million.

US officials say only about $US19 million has been returned from 2009 payments to AIG employees despite pledges to return $US45 million.

AIG promised to work with those employees “to round out the remaining amount of our giveback target over the next few months”.

The payments stem from employment contracts signed in 2007 that fall outside the jurisdiction of Feinberg, who oversees compensation at companies receiving bailout money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

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The figures, which are preliminary, are done some €1m on 2008, the association said. In 2007, the damages bill totalled €12m, with an additional €20m in damage to schools.

Insurers had been worried about a new cause of fires – Chinese lanterns – which were responsible for for destroying an entire shopping centre in Limburg earlier this year. ‘But the damage was luckily limited,’ an association spokesman told Nos tv.

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