Die Entwicklung der Ausgaben in der Gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung bis 2050 – bleibende Herausforderung für die deutsche Gesundheitspolitik

This paper projects the health expenditures in the social health insurance (SHI) in Germany until 2050. The long-term expenditure volume of the SHI is analyzed by OLS and vector autoregression (VAR) models. VAR models are less restrictive compared with OLS and impose no strict exogeneity assumption on the conditioning variables. The SHI expenditures are driven in particular by medical-technical progress and income. If the income-dependent financing of the SHI is maintained, SHI contribution rates will rise to values between 25 and 30 per cent in the OLS-models and between 23 and 28 per cent in the VAR models. Thus similar values become determined as in other projections, which use methodically an extrapolation of ageprofiles and were consulted here as benchmark. If the financing had been changed over in the year 2011 to income-independent flat rates per person, these would have been expected to rise from approximately 101 euros to values up to 733 euros in 2050.