Health-care flap

Germany's new health minister, Philipp Roesler, a member of the free-market liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), has ruffled feathers by calling for changes in the way the health-care system works in Germany.

"I have a clear goal - to launch a health-care system that functions well for 80 million people," Roesler told the mass-circulation newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

"We need more freedom. Freedom in the choice of therapy, freedom in the choice of doctors and health insurance providers," Roesler said.

He also said that public health funds should be made to compete with one another, that they should be free to set different premiums and offer different levels of service.

Horst Seehofer, head of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), immediately rejected any radical change to the health-care system.

"A health system in which the burdens are evenly distributed is something I've always stood for. This is not negotiable," Seehofer told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

Three of Germany's 15 cabinet ministers represent Seehofer's CSU.

'Making health care a commodity'

Martina Bunge, a health-care expert for the opposition Left party, said that Roesler was proposing fundamental changes to the way health care is viewed in Germany.

"More competition without rules to keep things fair just turns health care into a commodity - a commodity that will be sold to the highest bidder," Bunge said.

Bavarian Health Minister Markus Soeder said Germany's controversial health insurance fund should be modernized or possibly even done away with altogether.

The controversial fund, which came into effect at the beginning of 2009, gathers all Germans' public health contributions and then parcels them out to health-insurance providers. It is the unloved child of a marriage of convenience: a compromise brokered by the previous grand coalition government.

The IG Metall trade union, one of Germany's biggest, warned against departing from the principle of the country's social-welfare state.

Berthold Huber, the head of the union, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper that the coalition wanted to ditch the idea of distributing health-care costs evenly across society. He added that extra costs tended to hit workers harder.

Huge financial shortfall

In their coalition negotiations last month, the CDU and FDP agreed to restructure the expensive public health-care system, starting in 2011.

Currently, the combined contribution of employee and employer is 14.9 percent of a worker's gross income. The employer pays seven percent and the employee pays 7.9 percent. But the system is facing a 7.5 billion-euro ($11.1 billion) shortfall. It will be up to Roesler, who at 36 is Germany's youngest-ever minister, to try and fix this.

av/dpa
Editor: Nancy Isenson