At the Doctors' Day, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach varied his popular slogan of the necessary "de-economization" of the health care system. The Social Democrat knows that hardly any promise brings him faster applause than the seductive sentence: "The economy must not dominate medicine."
This is music to the ears of many patients, doctors or nurses and warms left souls. After all, the words suggest that the health care system can be freed from annoying shortages if the state only takes "enough" money into its hands and curbs private profit.
Both assumptions are misleading. The funds available for medical care compete with other state tasks, they will always fall short of the – growing – desires.
The art of good health policy is therefore precisely to strengthen economic incentives in the right places in order to make better use of scarce resources. Simply put, hard done. But the hospital reform will only be a success if Lauterbach also listens to economists.