Health Structure Act
| Basic data | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Law to secure and improve the structure of statutory health insurance |
| Short title: | Health Structure Act |
| Abbreviation: | GStrukG |
| Type: | Federal law |
| Scope: | Federal Republic of Germany |
| Legal matter: | Social law |
| References : | 860-5-7 |
| Issued on: | December 21, 1992 ( BGBl. I p. 2266 ) |
| Entry into force on: | predominantly January 1, 1993 |
| Last change by: |
Art. 205 Regulation of November 25, 2003 ( Federal Law Gazette I p. 2304, 2330 ) |
| Effective date of the last change: |
November 28, 2003 (Art. 340 of November 25, 2003) |
| Please note the note on the applicable legal version. | |
The Health Structure Act ( law to secure and improve the structure of statutory health insurance ) of December 21, 1992 pursued the goal of ensuring stable contribution rates for health insurance companies in the long term.
Short-term savings and long-term structural changes should lead to this goal. The main changes were:
- Budgeting of service expenditure and administrative costs
- Introduction of a pharmaceutical and therapeutic budget
- Increasing co-payments by the insured
- Control of the number of doctors through requirements planning
- Introduction of free choice of health insurance
- a risk structure compensation between the individual health insurance companies
- the planned introduction of a positive list for pharmaceuticals
- Outpatient operations should be encouraged
- Introduction of a new remuneration system for hospitals
Medicines and medicinal products budget
The upper limit for the total expenditure for drugs, bandages and therapeutic products initiated by the contract physicians was calculated on the basis of the expenditure in 1991 and 1992.
The statutory health insurance physicians always rejected the drug budgets because medical criteria were not sufficiently taken into account when setting them. The age development of the population was not taken into account at all.
Since January 2002, drug and drug budgets for doctors in a region have been abolished (see drug budget replacement law - ABAG) and replaced by spending volumes and targets.
Since the goals of the Health Structure Act were not achieved, the GKV reorganization laws came into force as early as 1997 .
