German insurers' chief wants fixed appointment quotas at all doctors' practices
Appointments should be allocated by medical need rather than insurance status, the head of Germany's statutory health insurers said. Publicly insured patients should not have to wait longer.
Symbolic image · Photo: Triplec85 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
The head of Germany's umbrella association of statutory health insurers, Oliver Blatt, called for fairer access to doctors' appointments for publicly insured patients. Appointments should be "allocated according to medical need and not according to how someone is insured," Blatt told the Funke media group. The roughly 75 million people with statutory insurance finance most doctors' fees but are often disadvantaged when booking appointments, he said, calling it a "crying injustice."
The association has proposed a daily updated platform on which all practices would offer a fixed share of their appointments without asking about insurance status. Doctors could still treat private patients but should not automatically give them priority. "A person with statutory insurance should not have to wait two weeks longer for that reason alone," Blatt said. He rejected the term "two-class medicine," saying the unequal treatment shows mainly in waiting times.
The debate has been running for weeks. About a month ago, Chancellor Friedrich Merz spoke of a possible "fairness problem" if private patients get appointments immediately while statutory patients wait weeks or months. On Friday, Jens Baas, head of insurer Techniker Krankenkasse, called for replacing the dual system of statutory and private health insurance with a new model.