How comprehensive is the medical care of migrants in Germany? According to Doris Pfeiffer, head of the GKV-Spitzenverband, health insurance companies have benefited from the increased immigration in 2016.
Immigration has had a positive effect on the financial stability of health funds, according to the GKV-Spitzenverband. Pfeiffer told the German Press Agency that in 2016 young people between the ages of 20 and 30 would have recently joined the statutory health insurance system. Of these, more than 60 percent were men and about 40 percent were women.
But the raised patient status of migrants corresponded to that of local private patients at the expense of the general public.
The latter was recently revealed by blogger Michael Klonovsky. Experienced practitioners agree with Klonovsky and two of them have been quoted by Klonovsky on his website.
Both commentators, a senior physician in a large children’s clinic and a general practitioner explain that for private patients, the doctor receives 2.3 times the fee rate of a cash-patient, and he could not do that with “refugees” as patients.
So the “private patient” comparison was “not quite right, but at least almost,” because: “It is true that a doctor earns more from a ‘refugee’ than from a cash-desk patient.” Refugees do not have to be billed according to the EBM, or uniform standard of assessment – the remuneration system for contract medical care in Germany.
And therefore the billing is not subject to a “capped budget” as under EBM regulations.
Unrecognized or tolerated asylum seekers receive medical benefits under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act. The costs are borne by the immigration office or the social welfare office. Every treatment, as officially required by the “competent authority”, must be “justified as an indispensable necessity”. This is however usually granted a “positive” rating.
Klonovsky notes that: “The doctor earns 2.3 times more on a private patient than on an escape simulant. On the latter, however, he earns still more (estimated: 3 to 5 times more on average) than on a cash-desk patient.”
In a Spiegel article from 22 March it becomes clear that doctors are actually earning a fortune from migrants. To the question: “What is considered acute, which therapies refugees do not get?” the response was: “The law leaves a great deal of room for interpretation here. The spongy formulation for acute illnesses and pains comes with a clause, according to which, in individual cases, treatment can also be given ‘beyond that if the services are essential to safeguard (…) health’. In other words, everything can be done, hardly anything is excluded. In Bremen, for example, refugees receive almost all benefits from the statutory health insurance.”