DKG Vice Lemke calls Lauterbach’s reform proposals “completely unrealistic” and the beginning of a “planned economy” in the hospital sector.
The clinic operator Sana sharply attacks Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) for his planned clinic reform and warns of hospital deaths and supply bottlenecks. Sana CEO Thomas Lemke, who is also Vice President of the German Hospital Society (DKG), complains in BILD am SONNTAG: “Half of our 53 clinics alone would be in danger with the Lauterbach reform.” Not only private houses are threatened, but also municipal ones hospitals. According to Lemke, there is already a lack of supply in the inpatient area: only 60 percent of the clinic’s capacities are online. “We already have waiting lists, tumor and heart operations are being postponed for weeks,” said the DKG Vice President.
Health Minister Lauterbach is planning to divide hospitals into different categories, which will determine which treatments a clinic will still be able to bill for in the future. Lemke criticizes this sharply: “Completely alien to life. Welcome to the planned economy.” Lauterbach wants to prescribe to every “chief physician in Stuttgart or in the Allgäu centrally how he has to operate on what, which prosthesis or heart valve he can use and which not, how he should use his staff and his resources”.
Small hospitals are to be managed by nursing staff in the future, but no more operations will then take place there. For Lemke, this is only an attempt to conceal the extent of the clear-cutting: “These would no longer be clinics, but rather better old people’s homes or rural outpatient clinics like in the GDR at the time.”
