The migrant crisis is hollowing out Germany’s private healthcare insurance schemes, with the federal government failing to cover the high costs of immigrant care.
A significant hole is growing in the finances of Germany’s decentralised healthcare system, as the cost of free at point of use healthcare for migrants who on average require significantly more care than native Germans at the time of their arrival stacks up. The healthcare deficit has already reached “several hundred million Euros”, and will reach one billion Euros by next year, reports Frankfurter Rundschau.
Germany has the oldest healthcare system in the world, based on a large number of small, local private insurance companies and private hospitals, and built for a wide tax payer base with provision for a small number of unemployed. As the migrant crisis got under way last year the German Federal government led by migrant-cheerleader Angela Merkel struck a deal with these providers that they would cover migrant healthcare for ‘free’, but has failed to re-reimburse them.
All unemployed in Germany receive healthcare insurance through the ‘Hartz IV’ benefits and there is a system in place for the government to pay these costs to the insurers who cover them, but the majority of migrants can’t legally get on this programme for 15 months or more, leaving them in limbo.
The deficit between what insurers pay out for unemployed health and dental has been growing for some time, but the gap has been widened considerably by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of unemployable, unskilled migrants. While the government may contribute €90 a month to insurance, costs to the company can be €200 a month or more for “normal” welfare recipients, and significantly more for migrants who may arrive in “traumatised” condition or injured.
The extra costs incurred by migrants will be passed on to taxpayers, reports Die Welt.
It is not just in hospital bills that Germany has found migrants incurring enormous expense. The cost of dental treatment, to get newly arrived migrants up to a European level of oral hygiene is expected to cost “billions” of Euros. As Breitbart London reported last month, the general condition of immigrant teeth has been described by one senior German dentist as “catastrophic”, and the majority of arrivals require “comprehensive” emergency work.