Why a practice fee would be absolute madness (opinion)

Many ahead to reform the health system looks like a grip in the moth box. What Employers’ association chief Steffen Kampeter has now proposed, is undoubtedly part of it. In a podcast, he advocated a new type of practice fee.

“We employers want them to Health insurance contributions finally become stable. But that means we also need lower expenses, “he argued. It means that employees should indirectly pay more for their health insurance.

That alone is new. Kampeter went one step further. He introduces himself to a contact fee that – Anders as the earlier practice fee – at every doctor’s appointment. A madness for German workers.

Kampeter’s advance is twice as absurd. Because when the practice fee was the first time from 2004 to 2012, it was shown that it does not work.

The additional payment did not develop the hoped -for control effect, nor stabilized the German health system. Instead, one thing stayed one thing above all: bureaucracy, injustice and frustration.

Those who needed medical help searched them despite a fee – if you rarely go to the doctor anyway, you did not change your behavior. The only “control” was that the practice personnel spent their time with collecting instead of patient advice.

It is particularly problematic that a contact fee hits the wrong one: chronically ill. You pay the most because you have to go to the doctor regularly.

A fee does not act as a control for you, but as an additional burden. She is punishing those who are already weakened in terms of health or financially disadvantaged.

A contact fee would delay the necessary visits to the doctor, delay diagnoses and therapies and ultimately cause higher follow -up costs for the entire system. People with little money could do without pension and control appointments- with potentially fatal health consequences.

Fortunately, lobbyist Kampeter with his crude ideas seems alone. Criticism comes from patient representatives, general practitioners, social associations and unions. You warn: Chronically sick people would then have to pay the fee dozens of times a year. “In particular, that would completely overwhelm socially weak financially,” warned the head of the general practitioner association.

So instead of doing a step back into the chapter of failed symbol policy again, politics should finally tackle the structural financing problems of the health system: fair contribution distribution, better rewarding domestic and specialists, breakdown of false incentives in care. These are the adjustment screws that are effective – not the introduction of a bureaucratic placebos.

The practice fee has once proven that it is expensive, inefficient and anti -social. Their reintroduction would be more than a political wrong path – she would be a slap in the face of the patient.