So far, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach’s secret is how the situation should improve.
(Photo: IMAGO/Bernd Elmenthaler)
Berlin The social long-term care insurance is the purest nuisance. Their members pay record fees and yet they face exorbitant co-payments for a place in a nursing home – the fastest way to burn money.
On average, the place now costs as much per month as an all-inclusive vacation in the Caribbean. Everyone can calculate how much of it they can afford.
This can safely be called expropriation, which in certain cases also affects relatives when one’s own money is no longer sufficient.
Then the spouse has to step in up to a limited amount of assets. Some are forced to sell their homes to defray the costs.
Children whose gross annual income is more than 100,000 euros can also be used to finance their own contribution. Then all that remains is to go to the social welfare office. Every third person ends up there.
The fact that the federal and state governments are not doing their job is a scandal
So far, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach’s secret is how the situation should improve. Except for small corrections, he has not yet presented anything. The idea of full nursing care insurance is in the air, for which the SPD politician has sympathy and economists are now making concrete proposals.
Given the hardships, that sounds like a redeeming idea. The hardships are partly self-inflicted.
Similar to the pension, hardly anyone thinks about becoming a nursing case at a young age – and fails to make provisions accordingly.
And why should one’s own assets be spared in old age in order to finance the emergency in the last phase of life? Comprehensive long-term care insurance is therefore also a safeguard for the wealthy. Some even say: heir protection insurance.
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To inflate the welfare state further, one should think carefully about it. That can only be the last resort. Mainly because the non-wage labor costs are already too high and Lauterbach has not yet exhausted other options.
It is completely unacceptable, for example, that the federal government refuses to pay non-insurance benefits such as for the pandemic and thus unnecessarily burdens the contributors. And it’s a scandal that the federal states invest too little in nursing homes and thus unnecessarily increase their own contributions.
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