Scheduling appointments
Health insurance companies complain about discrimination against those with statutory health insurance
Updated on December 26, 2024Reading time: 2 min.
Anyone who needs a specialist appointment sometimes has to wait weeks. The National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds wants to change that.
The umbrella association of statutory health insurance companies criticizes the preference given to those with private insurance over those with statutory health insurance when arranging doctor’s appointments. “If you want real equal treatment, you should ensure that when making an appointment you can no longer ask whether someone is legally or privately insured,” said the deputy head of the GKV, Stefanie Stoff-Ahnis, to the editorial network Germany (RND). “If you go to a booking portal and look for a specialist appointment as someone with statutory health insurance, you will be offered one in 6 weeks or even later. If you click on “private patient”, on the other hand, it will happen the next day.”
Stoff-Ahnis said 90 percent of people in Germany are legally insured. “It is more than justifiable that in the future, when making appointments, it is 100 percent about medical necessity and not about whether someone is insured by statutory health insurance or private health insurance.” When allocating appointments, she also called for a legal obligation for all medical practices to make free appointments available on a daily basis to an online portal that the statutory health insurance companies and the statutory health insurance associations can access.
The board of the German Patient Protection Foundation, Eugen Brysch, also called for legal changes. “The allocation system for specialist and family doctor appointments is opaque. Those seeking help also receive no support from health insurance companies,” Brysch told the dpa. A review of medical attendance times and allocation practices is overdue. Brysch demanded that the associations of statutory health insurance physicians be held “legally responsible” for this. The federal states, which actually have the duty to supervise procurement practices, are doing nothing to remedy the situation. According to Brysch, the future federal government should submit a report on appointment scheduling practices every two years. “Transparency ends discrimination,” he explained.
Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach called the distribution of appointments in the practices on X unfair. “If those with private insurance receive faster and better care than those with statutory health insurance, it is not a debate about envy. It is simply unfair if money decides who is treated first,” wrote the SPD politician. The “taboo topic of two-class medicine” must finally be addressed, he wrote in another post.