Hospital Rating Report 2006: Approaches to the Sustainable Financing of Patient Care and Treatment – Development of German Hospitals up to 2010

Health expenditures in Germany - as in almost all industrialized countries - grow more rapidly than the gross domestic product. Since a large portion of German health expenditures is financed by non-voluntary health premiums proportional to personal wages and collected by social health insurances, rising expenditures mean rising non-wage labor costs. This might trigger a vicious circle of rising non-wage labor costs and, as a consequence, rising unemployment which, in turn, reduces the number of payers to the social health insurances. To limit growth of health expenditures, German politics implemented budget constraints for some health care providers, especially for hospitals. Therefore, hospitals are under considerable strain to reduce their costs. Due to the demographic aging process and technical progress in health care, which tend to increase demand for health care services, expenditures are expected to rise above average while contributions to social health insurance remain constant at best. Given this situation it is of great importance to know more about the economic situation of German hospitals which have a market share in the health market of approximately 25% or roughly 60 billion euros in 2004..[...]