Federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn wants to lower the remuneration of pharmacies for creating digital corona vaccination certificates as of July 1st.
The CDU politician announced on Wednesday during consultations with his country colleagues, as the news agency dpa learned from participants.
The higher remuneration at the beginning should therefore serve to finance start-up costs for training, IT equipment and registrations, for example, and to create an offer for citizens in as many places as possible. The numbers for the first two days in the pharmacies showed that this was successful.
In total, more than ten million digital vaccination certificates have now been created at all issuing offices, Spahn reported on.
The digital proof should be issued immediately after the second vaccination in vaccination centers and practices.
Since Monday, it has also been possible to issue it at a later date in many pharmacies; citizens can pick up the proof there free of charge.
More than 10,000 pharmacies took part, said Spahn.
He was pleasantly surprised about that.
The EU-wide agreed digital proof is a voluntary addition to the yellow paper vaccination book that is still valid.
General practitioners criticize remuneration as disproportionate
However, there had been a lot of criticism of the amount of the remuneration, especially since the Federal Audit Office had criticized "a significant overcompensation" in favor of the pharmacies only last week with a view to the issue of free corona protective masks in winter. With regard to the digital vaccination certificate, the German Association of General Practitioners criticized the disproportionate level of remuneration.
The association justifies this as follows: On the one hand, doctors would only get six euros for the subsequent creation of vaccination certificates for their own patients, or two euros if they use their practice management system for this. On the other hand, they would get 20 euros for the vaccination itself, including information and advice, which is only slightly more. "The medical service itself is apparently currently far less important than the effort to initiate projects quickly," said the association chairman Ulrich Weigeldt of the FAZ
The opposition also criticized the lack of transparency about how the remuneration is made up. The FDP health politician Andrew Ullmann demanded that the ministry must disclose the basis of the calculation. The Federal Association of German Pharmacists' Associations, however, described the expenditure for the pharmacies, which Spahn also put forward, as considerable and therefore called the remuneration “reasonable”.