Germany Trying to Escape Obama’s Great Idea of German-Style Healthcare

Germany Trying to Escape Obama’s Great Idea of German-Style Healthcare

The geniuses in the Obama Administration pushing ObamaCare keep telling us that we need to be like Europe. And, in that vein, they’ve modeled the national healthcare plan they’re pushing on the German one. They keep telling us ours won’t be like Canada’s or Great Britain’s.

Nope, it’ll be like this gem in Germany:

Germany’s century-old universal health-care system, a model cited by reform advocates in the U.S. Congress, is buckling under the weight of a growing deficit that has forced the government to explore an overhaul. . . .

Costs are shared between employers and workers, whose premiums are staggered according to income.

Recently, however, the costs of the system have exploded. Rising medical costs and unemployment will leave the system €7.5 billion ($11.1 billion) short next year. Germany’s sinking birth rate and rapidly aging population mean the gap will only get worse.

Those trends will likely leave the government with no choice in the short term but to raise mandatory employee contributions. Germans already pay 8% of their gross wages into the centralized health-care pot, while their employers contribute an amount equal to 7% of gross wages.

Steadily rising health-care costs mean raising premiums can serve only as a stop-gap solution. In the long term, analysts say, Germany will almost certainly be forced to make painful cuts to a system that to many here is sacrosanct.

The financial strains on Germany’s health-care system underscore the challenges the U.S. could face if it adopts elements of the Bismarck model. Critics of U.S. President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats’ health overhaul plans argue the legislation winding through Congress doesn’t do enough to rein in spending and would saddle the government and Americans with higher health-care costs.