In a regular blog (kma Decisive Blog), Philipp Köbe, a lecturer and management consultant in the German healthcare system, questions whether there is anything wrong with private providers in the German healthcare system. He tries to refute the thesis that privatization will only lead to the commercialization of healthcare. In doing so, he also wonders whether the state can manage health care in Germany all by itself, without nonprofit and private providers of products and services jointly regulating the market. He sees the prime example of two-tier medicine regulated only by the state in Great Britain, where only higher earners can make use of private supplementary services.
In this country, however, public, non-profit, and private providers ensure more competition and safeguard the quality of healthcare with enormous potential for improvement, explains Köbe. He also raises the question of where appropriate remuneration of private providers of products and services begins and ends. In his opinion, entrepreneurs in the liberal professions are not just black sheep who only want to make a profit. State regulation without the intervention of private investors, who may be taking a high risk, is essential. This can be seen, for example, in providers in the medical technology sector at the current time of the Corona pandemic, but also in private service providers in the healing and caring professions and in various insurance offers from private service providers.
Complete government regulation is undesirable in this context and does not lead to the goal of creating incentives for private investors and entrepreneurs. In the author’s opinion, the Corona crisis has shown that the federal government alone is not capable of dealing with all the problems. Quite the opposite, in fact, because the Corona warning app, for example, is proving to be relatively ineffective, and the public health departments and the RKI are in some cases providing incomplete and distorted pictures of what is happening with regard to infections, Köbe explains.
Private companies, on the other hand, have adapted quickly, producing and delivering vaccines, producing enough masks, moving quickly on laboratory diagnostics to create testing capacity, as well as much more.
According to Köbe, all players together, public and private, must pull together to establish universal, high-quality healthcare in the long term.
Source: Kma-Online