It’s now a done deal: Employers will once again cover half of the statutory health insurance premiums—just as they did for decades. The Bundestag has passed the reform, which takes effect on January 1, 2019.
This is good news for workers in Germany. Their healthcare costs will be reduced because, in the future, employers will also pay half of the supplementary premium (“parity”).
Until now, the employer’s share of statutory health insurance premiums was capped. Insured individuals had to cover the additional premiums on their own. Thanks to the reform, starting in 2019, an employee earning an average salary will have 14 to 23 euros more in their pocket each month—depending on which health insurance provider they’re enrolled with.
A Broken Principle
The decision corrects an injustice in the healthcare system that had persisted since 2005. At that time, policymakers broke with the principle that employers and employees share health insurance premiums. Now, this tried-and-true practice is being restored.
“The fact that contributions will once again be split ‘fifty-fifty’ in the future is a victory for the unions,” says Hans-Jürgen Urban, who is responsible for social policy on the IG Metall executive board. “We fought long and hard for this: with a public awareness campaign, surveys, petition drives, and many discussions with health policymakers.”
For Urban, employers’ contribution to the additional premiums has another advantage: “Once their contribution is no longer frozen, employers will once again have an interest in keeping costs in check—for example, when it comes to drug prices.”
Insured patients are still footing the bill
Nevertheless, there is still plenty of work to be done in health policy. The move away from contribution parity was not the only injustice in the health care system. Another is the high copayments that patients with public health insurance have had to pay for years: for medications, walkers, or orthopedic shoe inserts.
These copayments alone amounted to around four billion euros in 2017. So-called patient contributions, for example for dental prostheses, are not even included in this figure. Employers are not required to contribute to any of these payments.
IG Metall is campaigning to abolish these copayments and to reinstate eyeglasses and dental prostheses in the health insurance providers’ list of covered services.
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