Specifically, the employee representative wants a mandatory e-card connection for private doctors and also wants to end their ability to only treat patients from more lucrative health insurance companies.
According to Huss, the system of free choice doctors, which is unique in Austria, “needs a comprehensive overhaul”. If private doctors want to work with the public system, “they will also have to communicate with it in the future, because the private doctor system is currently a black box for us,” argued the ÖGK chairman in a broadcast. Of the approximately 10,000 elective doctors, only around 460 have an e-card connection. “The use of ELGA, the e-prescription, an online billing system that is transparent for patients and shows which doctor’s services are reimbursed by health insurance and which are purely private services (homeopathy, bioresonance, etc.), must become standard for doctors.”
“Cherry picking” must be ended by law
In addition, the “cherry picking”, according to which panel doctors only terminate the ÖGK contract, but the contracts of BVAEB (civil servants) and SVS (self-employed and farmers) and thus these selected patients can keep “on the panel”, must be legally ended, demanded Huss. This also currently affects around 400 doctors.
The ÖGK chairman is convinced that the long-demanded risk structure compensation between the three remaining funds would level out further differences in performance. Because currently the BVAEB (without the higher deductibles) per insured person earns around 500 euros more per year than the ÖGK, which also leads to different benefits, Huss also referred to the corresponding criticism from Transparency International.
Huss also complained that not only are more and more trained doctors working as private doctors at the expense of the taxpayer, but that hospital doctors are also only available in some places if they are given the opportunity to run a private medical practice on the side. There are currently around 5,000 hospital doctors. According to Transparency International, this could also lead to corruption-like procedures, in which operation lists are then changed by the doctor who happens to be operating in the hospital for a fee. “We have long been calling for a transparent operating room waiting time list that also uses transparent coding to make it clear whether someone has been queued up. It would also make sense, if doctors want to work alongside their hospital work, to offer them this opportunity in a health insurance practice,” suggests Huss before.
Source: Nachrichten
