When money is tight, you can’t afford everything. This already applies to children and their first pocket money. And it especially applies to statutory health insurance companies. They are missing 15 billion euros for next year alone if the contributions of the insured are to remain stable. A committee of experts has therefore now presented 66 savings suggestions. This includes the recommendation: health insurance companies should no longer pay for homeopathic remedies in the future.
For medical reasons this is understandable and understandable. Meta-studies repeatedly show that homeopathic remedies only have a placebo effect. “Homeopathy is a service that does not provide any medical benefit based on scientific evidence,” argued former Health Minister Karl Lauterbach two years ago. So if you absolutely have to do without something, it would probably be globules and Schuessler salts.
50 million euros per year could be saved if patients had to pay for homeopathic remedies themselves in the future. That’s not a large sum, but statutory health insurance companies spend almost 60 billion euros a year on medication alone. And in fact, anyone who is serious about saving should also tackle the small items. In the case of homeopathy however, it is different.
Because there is a weighty counter-argument. The statutory health insurance companies compete with each other – fortunately. Because thanks to this competition, the cash registers are under pressure to do as well as possible. The insured benefit from this because it keeps the additional contribution as low as possible. The providers also have a high level of self-interest in reducing bureaucracy and investing in digitalization. All of this is politically desired and in the interest of the insured.
There needs to be competition among the cash registers
In fact, the health insurance business is highly regulated. They can only decide to a very limited extent which services they offer their customers and which they do not. Homeopathy is one of the few exceptions. This also includes offers such as covering the costs of professional teeth cleaning or back training. The health insurance companies can cover the costs for this, but they do not have to do so. The health insurance companies even differ in the amount of the benefit; some only cover homeopathic remedies worth 25 euros per year, others pay up to 500 euros.
You can describe this as a luxury, an expensive marketing ploy by the health insurance companies to score points with certain target groups – as in the case of the beads with the younger insured people. And yet it is legitimate to strengthen competition in the market. Especially since the price is manageable.
However, if you remove the competitive pressure, you increase the costs of the entire system in the long term. That’s why a certain number of statutory health insurance companies are required. And there needs to be services in which they differ. Just like homeopathy, as controversial as it is.