Health Care Reform in Germany (Essay‪)‬

1 Introduction The German health care system is undergoing a process of fundamental change affecting both its care structures and its financial and regulatory mechanisms. This transformation is an expression of a paradigm change in health policy initiated during the first half of the 1990s. At the heart of the transformation is the implementation of competition--centered structural reforms designed to establish a regulated market in the health service and help modernize structures of medical provision that had come to be regarded as inefficient. These reforms have been accompanied by a progressive privatization of treatment costs. This paradigm change in health policy increasingly favors the goal of adapting the health care system to the perceived requirements of a globalized economy at the expense of the aim of covering the social life--risk of "sickness". Since it began, health policy has proceeded down that chosen development path, generally by means of incremental reforms.