Flat-rate premiums the best way to implement a citizens' insurance

Prof. Wagner, who teaches at the Institute for Economics and Law at the Technical University of Berlin and is research director for Social Risk Management at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), was a member of the Commission on the Sustainability of Financing Social Insurance Systems, the so-called Rürup Commission. In his opinion, the compromise reached in the summer cannot solve the long-term problems of the German health service. With the model of a citizens' insurance and the flat-rate premium system the Rürup Commission proposed two apparently irreconcilable reform concepts. A synthesis is possible, however, but requires "a willingness to change in society beyond the problem of sustainable financing". The citizen premium he favours in which every adult pays a flat-rate premium for health insurance that he can change at any time combined with a targeted social compensation would prevent the creation of a two-class health care system. In the model the idea of social solidarity is realised, and would not be to the detriment of job creation. Such a reform "would by no means be a systems revolution but would be a further development of the existing system of statutory and private health insurance and would not destroy either of the insurance types".