Health insurance companies: BKK Firmus announces further mergers

Merger on July 1, 2027

More health insurance companies announce mergers

The BKK Firmus has no longer been open nationwide since April of this year. The Bremer health insurance company wants to change this situation with another merger.

The number of health insurance companies continues to fall: BKK Firmus and Heimat Krankenkasse have announced that they will join forces in the future. The administrative boards of the two health insurance companies have signed a corresponding declaration of intent. The merger is planned for July 1, 2027. The combined fund will be called BKK Firmus.

The merger would create a health insurance company with almost 1.4 million insured people. The lion’s share (1.2 million) comes from BKK Firmus, which in the past few weeks already two more mergers with smaller company health insurance companies had announced:

• The merger with BKK Rieker Ricosta Weisser (3,118 insured persons) is scheduled to be completed on January 1, 2027.
• The merger with BKK Pfaff (39,950) is also planned for January 1, 2027.

According to the 2024 annual report, the Heimat health insurance company has almost 120,000 insured people. It emerged in 2000 from the merger of BKK CA Delius & Söhne and BKK Oetker, the company health insurance company of the Bielefeld Oetker Group, which is behind brands such as Dr. Oetker, Coppenrath & Wiese and the Radeberger Group.

As a result of the merger, BKK Firmus, which is considered one of the cheapest health insurance companies in Germany, would be open again to insured people throughout Germany. In April, the Bremen health insurance company was prohibited from accepting insured people from six federal states (Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia) because the parent company of BKK Firmus does not have any operating facilities in these countries, as required by health insurance organization law.

• 376,000 insured people affected: Two other health insurance companies are considering merging
• Surprising decision: Cooperation ended: health insurance companies call off merger

The announced mergers of BKK Firmus are part of previously announced mergers. So have the IKK healthy plus and the IKK Brandenburg and Berlin their merger was already decided on October 1st of this year. Those too mkk and the BKK Pfalz want to join forces.

The health insurance companies themselves, however, view forced mergers very critically. A blanket merger obligation would not bring any relevant savings, the IKK association emphasized at a press conference last week. Today, 84 percent of those insured by statutory health insurance are already insured with one of the 20 largest health insurance companies. In addition, the administrative costs are comparatively low at four percent of total expenses. “Size alone does not create better care or proximity to insured people or sustainable financing,” noted Hans-Jürgen Müller, CEO of the IKK Association.