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Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) at an appearance in Düsseldorf
Photo: IMAGO/Michael Gstettenbauer
The situation in large parts of the German healthcare system is quite tricky: This is also due to the triangular relationship between patients, the service providers treating them – and those who have to pay for the resulting costs. Essentially, these are the statutory health insurance funds and – for example, because of the high federal subsidy for statutory health insurance – the state. Patients use the services of doctors, pharmacies or hospitals. As a rule (and fortunately), however, it is not they themselves who pay for this, but the health insurance companies.
In the past, this payment via gangs has meant that payers have had little influence on the development of treatment costs or drug expenditures. Decades ago, therefore, the solution was more economic pressure. For example, for a more efficient use of scarce resources in the health care system, lump sums per case have been introduced.
Lauterbach wants higher retention payments
However, this has led to deficiencies in patient care in some cases – and on a broad front to resentment among doctors and hospital staff working under high pressure, and also among patients. Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) has promised to respond. He has announced a "de-economization" of the health care system.
But he doesn't just get applause for that. The head of the Laboratory Physicians' Association of Accredited Laboratories in Medicine (ALM), Michael Müller, has sharply criticized Lauterbach for the initiative. This would ultimately lead to a "state medicine" in which the Minister of Health dictates "who is to be employed and how much money is to be spent on it," Müller told the "Ärzte Zeitung".
Lauterbach had said in May at the German Doctors' Conference on the reform of hospital financing planned by his house, it was about a "deeconomization" of the system. The plans of the Minister of Health envisage, among other things, that the financing of the clinics in the future will be more through retention payments for staff and technology and less through the previous lump sums per patient.
Criticism of crackdown on investors
Müller, whose association ALM claims to represent more than 200 medical laboratories and more than 1000,<> laboratory physicians, described the term "deeconomization" to the "Ärzte Zeitung" as a "complete negation of the foundations for the further development of good medicine".
Müller is also critical of Lauterbach's plans to limit the role of private investors in the health care system. A "dynamic development" of medicine does not exist "without private capital," he said.
beb/AFP