Die Schweiz als Vorbild? Bemerkungen zur Diskussion um eine Reform des deutschen Gesundheitswesens

Taking into account the Swiss experience, this paper considers some aspects of the current reform discussion concerning the German health insurance system. The income dependence of effective premia, their size and their distributional consequences are discussed. The potential role of competition is also considered. It is shown that there are only gradual but no systematic differences between the current German and Swiss systems with respect to their labour market consequences that are central to the present German discussion, while those aspects where the two systems really differ are rarely ever discussed, and the planned new German system will hardly differ in these other dimensions from the old one.