Laws needed for the merger to take place will be prepared this year, Heger said.
He recalled that the policy statement of the coalition government from mid-2010 reckons with the lowering of the number of health insurers operating in the Czech Republic.
Heger said further mergers of health insurers may follow.
Apart from the major insurer VZP, there are seven other health insurance companies in the 10.5-million country. The VZP has 6.3 million clients.
The ZPMV is the second largest Czech health insurer, with more than 1.1 million clients. The VoZP has nearly 600,000 clients.
Heger said in January that the bill on health insurers would force the insurers to improve their actions and more cooperate with the health care system.
He said the state would like to motivate the better insurers by helping them to be profitable, while the worse ones would not have profits and would be forced to merge with the better ones.
The Czech health insurers are to have expenditures by 3.5 billion crowns higher than incomes this year. Their total expenditures are to be about 230.5 billion crowns and their total incomes over 227 billion crowns.
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CZECH REPUBLIC: Government to merge two big health insurance companies
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