It's much better than the for profit system we operate under, imo:
A little background on Germany’s health care system: Everyone has health insurance, and the premiums paid are placed into a pool and distributed among the 200 nonprofit insurers from which Germans can choose. Parents don’t pay for their children’s health insurance, probably as an encouragement to increase the country’s lagging birthrate.
As a group, the insurers negotiate prices with medical professionals. Those too poor to afford insurance have it subsidized. The nation’s health care spending is about 10 percent of its gross domestic product. By comparison, the United States’ spending is 16.2 percent and rising. In 2007 and 2008, 86.7 million people were without insurance at some point, according to research by health care advocate Families USA.
My health care experience in Germany ended 10 years ago when I returned to the United States, so I wrote to my cousin Veronika, a nurse at a surgical unit with 30 beds in Bavaria. Not only does she work in the system, but she also pays taxes that go toward providing her health insurance.
She shared her thoughts on the system — good, bad, otherwise — and I’ll share them with you (for the record, I translated the letter from German to English).
Her monthly income, before taxes, is 2,000 euros, or $2,900. From this, she pays 8.2 percent in a health payroll tax, up to about $1,300 a year. There are people in the U.S. who pay this per month.
“Personally, I find this totally OK,” she said. “It’s not necessarily cheap, but it’s also not overly expensive. Anyway, everyone has to pay into it.”
The Link
A little background on Germany’s health care system: Everyone has health insurance, and the premiums paid are placed into a pool and distributed among the 200 nonprofit insurers from which Germans can choose. Parents don’t pay for their children’s health insurance, probably as an encouragement to increase the country’s lagging birthrate.
As a group, the insurers negotiate prices with medical professionals. Those too poor to afford insurance have it subsidized. The nation’s health care spending is about 10 percent of its gross domestic product. By comparison, the United States’ spending is 16.2 percent and rising. In 2007 and 2008, 86.7 million people were without insurance at some point, according to research by health care advocate Families USA.
My health care experience in Germany ended 10 years ago when I returned to the United States, so I wrote to my cousin Veronika, a nurse at a surgical unit with 30 beds in Bavaria. Not only does she work in the system, but she also pays taxes that go toward providing her health insurance.
She shared her thoughts on the system — good, bad, otherwise — and I’ll share them with you (for the record, I translated the letter from German to English).
Her monthly income, before taxes, is 2,000 euros, or $2,900. From this, she pays 8.2 percent in a health payroll tax, up to about $1,300 a year. There are people in the U.S. who pay this per month.
“Personally, I find this totally OK,” she said. “It’s not necessarily cheap, but it’s also not overly expensive. Anyway, everyone has to pay into it.”
The Link
