The high reserves of the health fund and individual health insurance companies are particularly appealing to lobbyists who advocate “carry on like this” and “more of the same”. Here a patch in favor of the hospitals, there one against the worrying excesses of the different statutory health insurance and private health insurance fees and, not to forget, more money to ensure rural care. The grand coalition is also focusing more on small-scale, incremental reforms, but is opening a new door for innovative, cross-sectoral forms of care with an innovation fund of 300 million euros annually. At the same time, everyone involved knows that, depending on the economic and immigration developments, social service providers will probably face financing problems again from 2016 or 2017, which will require more fundamental reforms and will also increase significantly in the following years. The US innovation economist Clayton Christensen is now formulating the thesis that the actual disruptive innovations or leap innovations are not initiated by politics, but by the supplying economy. He has analyzed innovation processes from various economic sectors for many decades and comes to the conclusion that in all of these areas it is ultimately always possible, according to certain rules, to develop cheaper solutions for an increasing number of consumers. He also analyzed the healthcare system. Here too, the time is ripe for cheaper solutions. In the following, this thesis will be examined and the opportunities and obstacles of breakthrough innovations for the German healthcare system will be weighed up. In healthcare, do we really always have to automatically assume that everything will be more expensive? Or have we gotten ourselves into a system that produces exactly this spiral of inflation, and are there ways to get out of it? What can we learn for the future of our healthcare system from analyzing the innovation patterns of other industries? What role do new business models that are geared towards outcomes rather than quantity of services play? And above all: who will be the market participants who will launch these breakthrough innovations?

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