health insurance
Debate about cash contributions: more additional payment and doctor’s fee?
The expenses of the health insurance companies rise, the income lags behind. Suggestions against the misery are piling up. Should patients be asked more to checkout for medicines?
According to considerations for a practice fee, a new proposal to improve health insurance finances is aimed at higher drug co-payments. The Bielefeld health economist Wolfgang Greiner proposed in the newspapers of the Funke media group, which in his view to adapt very low deductibles of patients to the development of inflation in the past few years. According to him, this would be the same as a doubling: “So 10 euros per medication, a maximum of 20 euros.”
Medicines would fall out of the reimbursement
According to Greiners, the income from the additional payments would also double. Today they are around 2.5 billion euros. A whole series of drugs would then no longer be in the reimbursement because their price would be lower than the deductible, as Greiner explained. Today, the health insurance members make additional payments of ten percent of the price, but at least five, at most ten euros. For example, if a medication costs 4.75 euros, insured persons pay 4.75 euros. The amount of the additional payment has been stable for 20 years.
Employers demand broad cost damping
The debate about a practice fee continues. In addition to such a contact fee, Germany’s employers require cost -dusting reforms in all insurance areas. “Then this penalty tax is finally over,” said BDA general manager Steffen Kampeter of the German Press Agency in Berlin with a view to the increased non-wage costs.
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“The constant increasing contributions to health insurance are unsocial. The gross is less and less net of the workers,” said Kampeter. “Work is too expensive in Germany. So we don’t get out of the recession.”
Practice fee: Irr way or option?
Kampeter had attracted violent criticism with the suggestion of a contact fee for every visit to the doctor to limit “Ärzte-Hopping” and a contribution stabilization. General practitioners, patient protectors and trade unionists had faced him. Now he defended the controversial proposal as an opportunity to make the social systems more efficient and fairer. “It would also make sense to concentrate the hospital landscape, better patient control, better integration of outpatient and inpatient – and overall more competition in the system.”
The Greens also demand course corrections – but others. “A contact fee for visits to the doctor would be nothing more than a relapse into old wrong ways,” said Green Health expert Janosch Dahmen to the German Press Agency. The core problem of the healthcare system is also not on the revenue side, but, among other things, with expenses running out of the helm, for example for hospital care and medicines.
“This is precisely why it is so skilful that the Union with Minister of Health Nina Warken has not launched any of the overdue structural reforms after 100 days,” Dahmen said to the address of the CDU department head. “This is health policy of refusal to realize.”
Taxpayers also asked to checkout
In view of the growing gap between revenue and expenditure, expert Greiner considers billion -dollar amounts of the federal government from tax funds – such as Warken as a grant and not just as a loan. A loan is not enough and only postpone the problem. Warking wants to work for grants in the upcoming budget negotiations.
More than 1 percentage point higher additional contribution?
Most recently, the Federal Audit Office had raised the alarm: After record growth in the expenditure of health insurance companies in 2024, the cash revenue would continue to lag over the expenses. The result: higher additional contributions. According to a scenario cited by the financial controllers, they could increase an average of 2.9 percent by 2029 from the beginning of 2025 to 4.05 percent.
The recent report by the Auditors ‘Court should be “the final wake -up call in Berlin,” said the chairman of the Health Ministers’ Conference, Thuringia’s Minister of Health Katharina Schenk (SPD), the newspapers of the Funke Mediengruppe. “Statutory health insurance now urgently needs to be subjected to a fundamental structural reform and further developed as a solidarity -financed system.”
Rules of pharmaceuticals to Wolfgang Greiner
dpa
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
