Abstracts by keywords: incentives
The statutory health insurance companies are responsible for statutory health insurance (GKV) in Germany. The GKV market is subject to an ongoing, albeit slowing, concentration process with a steadily declining number of providers in the market - the number of health insurance companies has fallen from 950 in 1995 to 110 currently (Federal Health Reporting 2018). The individual health insurance companies are in competition with each other, whereby the majority of their range of services is uniformly designed across all funds via the mandatory GKV service catalogue. The opportunities to stand out from other health insurance companies are very limited. On the service side, this is only possible in the area of the so-called statutory services, via selective contracts with service providers or via additional services. In addition, there is competition over the price in the form of the individual health insurance fund's additional contribution. However, functioning competition in health insurance systems only makes sense if either the conditions for a perfect market are met or balancing mechanisms are implemented that enable functioning competition (cf. also fundamentally Dahl, Lux and Matusiewicz 2012; Matusiewicz 2016).
04.04.2019
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?
24.01.2013
Influence of insurance status and income on waiting times in the outpatient sector. The length of the waiting time for an appointment in the outpatient and inpatient sectors is considered an important quality indicator and a significant parameter for access to medical care in most countries. Since waiting times are often perceived as an implicit form of rationing of healthcare services, this […]
25.09.2012
Pay for Performance – An Option for Germany? Germany is considered a developing country when it comes to "pay for performance" (P4P). P4P has also established itself in Germany as a term for strategic compensation systems in which a portion of compensation is tied to measured performance levels. Two recently published reports (Veit et al. 2012 and Charlesworth et al. 2012) […]