He's the Corona man now.

Karl Lauterbach has been explaining the situation on talk shows since the pandemic has kept the country under control, i.e. for almost two years.

It was an astonishing resurgence after he had maneuvered himself into political sideline due to his failed candidacy for the SPD chairmanship and the task of spokesman's office in the Bundestag.

Suddenly he became a cult figure, at least with a majority.

And the fact that a minority fought him so fiercely that, as a simple member of parliament, he even needed personal protection, perhaps even contributed to it.

In the end, his Social Democrats could no longer avoid making him minister, even though he had always been an outsider among them.

Ralph Bollmann

Correspondent for economic policy and deputy head of economics and “Money & More” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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There is also another Karl Lauterbach, one who could become even more important in the course of the coming election period.

And that is when the pandemic should one day subside and clear the view of the financial holes it has left behind - in the public coffers in general and in the health system in particular.

The scientist among politicians

Because Lauterbach is not only an outsider as a doctor among all the lawyers and political scientists, of whom the new cabinet in the old German tradition largely consists. He is also an economist, more precisely: a health economist. In other words, a scientist who always looks at medical practices and hospitals with a cost-benefit calculation that relates quality to the money that is spent on them. And all too often found in the past that the relationship between the two in Germany does not look very favorable, at least not in all branches of the health system.

Lauterbach studied the subject, more precisely: Health Policy and Management, not just anywhere, but at the American elite University Harvard, where he also taught before he took over the management of the newly founded Institute for Health Economics and Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Cologne in 1998. He was not a politician, but an expert, but had influence and sat on important advisory boards - in the Advisory Council for the Health Care System, for example, or in the Rürup Commission, which, during the red-green years of government under Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, came up with new ideas for financing social systems should develop.

He also earned quite well, and when he changed sides after Schröder's election in 2005 and entered the Bundestag himself, he publicly complained about severe income losses.

To make matters worse, he had to finance the direct election campaigns in his constituency Cologne-Mülheim, which he always won with confidence.

Lauterbach, who was once a member of the CDU when he was young, is actually considered a leftist in the SPD, after his entry into the Bundestag he also joined this wing organizationally.

But here, too, he always remained a solitaire, and precisely because he grew up in humble circumstances, his proposals for a more efficient health system by no means always harmonized with the ideas of people whose imaginations had always made money from the machine.

Even critics agree with Lauterbach

Sure, he was in favor of a citizens' insurance from the beginning, against the separation of private and statutory insurance in what he called two-class medicine.

But he also used economic arguments for this and railed at every opportunity against over-supply and inadequate care, which in addition to the much-discussed shortages in the German health system are also plentiful.

When he went into the field of general social analysis a decade and a half ago in a somewhat sensational book about the “two-class state”, he was attacked by economists for his theses.

But even his harshest critics admitted that the chapter on his ancestral area of ​​expertise contained "some accurate observations on inefficiency and lack of transparency in health care".