[Translate to German:]
The health policy debate in Germany rotates around the question whether Germany’s two pillar insurance system should be dissolved and replaced by universal coverage under the roof of the public system (so called citizen insurance, “Bürgerversicherung”). Most of the time, such a reform is argued from the perspective of the 90 percent of the German population which are already insured by a sickness fund. Rarely, the consequences of currently privately insurants are analysed. However, especially German civil servants are of great interest in this regard, as they are most times partly insured in the private scheme while the other part of their benefits is directly paid by the taxpayer. As the scheme for civil servants is more generous than the public scheme, the question of compensation arises when talking about the Bürgerversicherung reform. The analysis shows that if civil servants are only partly compensated by their employers (federal and state governments), the reform has a short-run negative fiscal impact.
[Translate to German:]
At the beginning of their career civil servants in Germany can choose between the social health insurance system and a private plan combined with a direct reimbursement of the government up to 80%. Most civil servants chose the latter, also because they have to cover all contribution payments to the social system themselves, while normal employees get nearly 50% from their employers. The state of Hamburg decided to change the system by paying a share of the contributions if civil servants choose the social plan. Using a comparison of internal rates of return in both schemes, we show that this celebrated reform will not change the decision calculus for the average civil servant household and will probably thereby increase the adverse selection of high risk cases towards the social health insurance.
[Translate to German:]
Aim: The German E-Health law is supposed to improve efficiency, quality and accessibility of the German healthcare system. This study analyzes the preferences of patients regarding digital health services and compares these to the priorities of the lawmaker.
Method: Two discrete choice experiments (DCE) were executed to reveal preferences and willingness to pay of patients concerning digital health information and telemedicine. Results German patients clearly prefer the storage of a comprehensive electronic health record followed by emergency data on their health-insurance card. A medication plan appears to be by far the least preferred option. Considering telemedical care, communication via E-Mail instead of online video consultations or text-chats is preferred
Conclusion: The results of this study reveal significant discrepancies between priorities of the E-Health law and the preferences of patients in Germany. This clearly questions adoption of the services by patients and hence the desired positive effects of the law.
In this paper we apply the method of Generational Accounting to analyse whether today’s government policy burdens future generations with a heavier load than current generations. We analyse pay-as-you-go pension systems and their reforms in Norway, Poland and Germany. Our results show that, through these reforms, pension systems in all three countries became more intergenerationally balanced as the implicit debt to be paid by future generations was reduced. However, the burden is shared differently: in Norway
current pensioners have to contribute to enhancing the financial sustainability of the pension system while Poland and Germany seem to protect current pensioners at the expense of younger generations.
The emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is still an unresolved problem worldwide. In intensive care units (ICUs), first‐line antibiotic therapy is highly standardized and widely empiric while treatment failure because of AMR often has severe consequences. Simultaneously, there is a limited number of reserve antibiotics, whose prices and/or side effects are substantially higher than first‐line therapy. This paper explores the implications of resistance‐induced substitution effects in ICUs. The extent of such substitution effects is shown in a dynamic fixed effect regression analysis using a panel of 66 German ICUs with monthly antibiotic use and resistance data between 2001 and 2012. Our findings support the hypothesis that demand for reserve antibiotics substantially increases when resistance towards first‐line agents rises. For some analyses the lagged effect of resistance is also significant, supporting the conjecture that part of the substitution effect is caused by physicians changing antibiotic choices in empiric treatment by adapting their resistance expectation to new information on resistance prevalence. The available information about resistance rates allows physicians to efficiently balance the trade‐off between exacerbating resistance and ensuring treatment success. However, resistance‐induced substitution effects are not free of charge. These effects should be considered an indirect burden of AMR.
Our study compares mortalities of long-term care (LTC) patients who are covered by statutory LTC insurance with regard to gender, age and distribution of care levels. The analysis is based on claim data which was provided by an East-German statutory LTC fund (AOK Plus). We show for both genders a distribution which is skewed to the right. Therefore 50 % of all female (male) LTC patients are dead after 45 (26) months while the average duration in the LTC system is 52 (37) months. The associated costs given these distributions are 64,541 (42,905) Euro in present value terms. The analysis of care levels via a multinomial logistic model shows for our data set a compression of LTC patients’ morbidity. Given rising life expectancy a higher care level (associated with a more severe LTC condition) is therefore more unlikely for both genders.