Despite oversupply, SHI in Germany outpaces PMI
It’s not surprising in a country with an oversupply of healthcare that private medical insurance (PMI) expenditure is low. What may be surprising is despite this oversupply, statutory insurance expenditure is still growing at a far faster rate than PMI.
Data from the German Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) shows that since 2016, SHI expenditure is up approximately 21% to €255bn while PMI expenditure is up around 17% to €36bn.
PMI expenditure grew 5.01% in 2018 while SHI expenditure grew only 3.6% – but this is the only time private outpaced public in the five years graphed here. The biggest jump for the SHI was between 2020 and 2021, where it grew 5.6% – possibly due to increased activity to deal with Covid.
Under health minister Karl Lauterbach’s reforms this may change as the minister aims to curb overactivity, however this would result in a reduction in year-on-year spending increases in the SHI and not necessarily growth in PMI. In other Bismarckian countries such as Sweden PMI uptake has only grown as access to the public sector became more difficult.
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