[Health economic analysis of the effects of offered complementary medical procedures on health insurance].

A randomized trial is being conducted to determine whether the offer of unconventional medicine as a health benefit by the health insurance funds has a substitutional or additional effect on the use of conventional medicine. For this purpose, a stratified random sample of 5000 enrollees of the largest Swiss health insurance fund is receiving, as an experiment group, an insurance supplement for unconventional medicine during the next three years free of charge. The rest of the insured population with comparable health insurance but without coverage of unconventional medicine is the control group. The third group to be examined are insured persons who have already chosen the unconventional health insurance supplement on their own account. Data of inpatient and outpatient costs and use of conventional and unconventional health services will be collected and analyzed. The third group with self-selected insurance supplement for unconventional medicine will be compared systematically with the other two groups. A further random sample of persons from each of the three groups will be interviewed at different points of time about their health perceptions.