Consultations should increase – expert demands doubling

Health insurance companies in the crisis

Expert demands twice as high drug additional payment

A health economist demands significantly higher medication. This would often mean doubling the costs for patients.

According to the latest considerations for a practice fee, there is now a new proposal to improve the finances of the health insurance companies. Accordingly, patients should make higher additional payments for medicines.

The Bielefeld health economist Wolfgang Greiner said in the newspapers of the Funke Mediengruppe that the previous excesses were very low in his view. He therefore proposed to adapt it to the inflation development of the past few years – which would be equal to doubling: 10 euros per medication, a maximum of 20 euros.

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 with a view to the increased non-wage costs.

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 Greens health expert Janosch Dahmen. 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.

In view of the growing gap between income 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 loans. A loan is not enough and only postpone the problem. Warking wants to work for grants in the upcoming budget negotiations.