The brokenness of German private health insurance

Eine Geschichte der Moral

In Germany, every citizen is obliged to have health insurance. To accomplish this we have a system consisting of a big fund containing the money for the public health insurance policies offered by different insurers. People with public health insurance (which is the majority) pay into the fund and get their insurance paid out of it.

And then someone came along and thought of the concept of private health insurance: You pay on your own, you might get higher rates as you get older, but in exchange for that you get better service and preferential treatment at clinics and doctor's practises. For most people this is not an option, but as you earn more, the public solidarity system also takes more, while private insurers will take the same price as before for their policies. This leads to the phenomenon of wealthier, higher earning people exiting public health insurance in favor of private insurance.

This, on its own, sounds fine. But like all good things, this too has a catch: By switching to private health insurance you stop contributing to the solidarity system given to us by public health insurance.
So in essence those, who could and do pay most into the public system can just extract themselves from it and stop paying. While this feels like a very fitting thing in our current capitalistic society, it is not the right thing to be happening in my humble opinion. Especially those who earn more and possess more than most others should be the ones to help those less fortunate and not sit on their wealth, giving it from generation to generation and hoarding it only for their own wellbeing. This is something that should be enforced by a government, but at the same time isn't.

Another thing to mention is that private insurers tend to highten your premiums as you get older. This leads to some people who once had private health insurance to not be able to afford this anymore and to fall back to the public healtcare system without having properly contributed to it. Since those people tend to also be a lot older, they tend to have more medical issues that need costly tending to, making this even more problematic. As the saying goes: privatize profits, socialize losses.

In the end, this is just a question of morals and yet another thing that goes wrong in our social welfare systems.
I wish that the German government would start adressing issues like this one and start taking something like a "Soli-Zuschlag" (solidarity surcharge) from people with private health insurance. And don't let me get started on the duality of both people living in poverty and ones where a few thousand Euro are just day-to-day chump change living in the same society with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

But this is it from me :3