German politicians are fond of saying, “Work must be worth it.” But ever more people who work full-time need state benefits. And the new minimum wage hike is seen as disappointing.
German politicians are fond of saying, “Work must be worth it.” But ever more people who work full-time need state benefits. And the new minimum wage hike is seen as disappointing.
Think about the economy without money. There is a fixed amount of things that can be done with the available resources. That doesn’t change, no matter how wages or taxes are allocated. If taxes would decrease, inflation would compensate that.
If we want more, we need more. Cheaper resources or more profits from our products.
This is definitely a point, but Germany’s problem with the inefficient retirement and government healthcare systems (96 government providers? WHY?!) is a snowball that’s been accelerating downhill for a long time and that needs to be addressed ASAP. The systems need to be reformed, otherwise we’re looking at exponentially rising costs for both of those systems that will have to be paid by the average citizen. The health insurance providers are running on fumes money-wise and have already had to increase the contribution factor significantly, and this is just the beginning. It’s ironic how SPD says “Wir dürfen uns keine Denkverbote auferlegen” (roughly meaning “We shouldn’t be closed to any new thoughts”) while suggesting to raise the health insurance assessment threshold from ~5500EUR/mo to ~8000EUR/mo, thus hitting middle-class even harder than it already is, without changing anything about the system itself. This is pretty much the “We’ve been doing this for a long time already, why change anything?” mentality that hit Germans very hard when they had cheap gas cut off after having relied on it for several decades.
Unpopular opinion, but I actually like the competitive landscape in public health care in Germany. IMHO this is the best example for capitalism: you define exactly what each company has to deliver, and they can compete on:
pricing
service
additional benefits
The nature of the strong regulation here makes them compete on actual relevant things, and they can’t externalize the costs (mostly).
I actually believe having just one public health care company would result in a worse service.
I would rather focus on the ridiculous increase in wealth inequality, in Germany, and around the globe. That’s the root of all evil.
Competiton is always good for the consumer, sure, but too much of it is wasted money. It should be maybe 5-6 Krankenkassen, maybe bump that to 8-9, but this should be in no case a double-digit number. This is in my eyes the sweet spot for both preventing the formation of a cartell and simultaneously offering a wide range of services.
Just think about it, the current 96 companies all have to have their own C-suite, most likely several hundreds of employees - for what? This is a huge waste.
About 95% of the money spent by the public health insurance company is „Leistungsausgaben“, I.e., paying out people for health related costs.
You can’t optimize that away, even when combining the companies. The remaining 5% is overhead. Having worked in a big company, I can tell you that big companies are not that much more efficient than small companies. In fact, the overhead is often even larger since there is lots more cross-communication involved between departments. In the end, everyone that is now a CEO would be an SVP instead, and barely anything would change.