/Gina Sanders, stock.adobe.com
Berlin – According to the Greens, the hardship fund will not be enough to save hospitals from bankruptcy. The situation in the clinics is already dramatic, said Armin Grau, the responsible Green Party politician Spiegel.
The hospitals needed more money in the short term, said Grau, a member of the Bundestag’s health committee. The hospital reform planned by the traffic light coalition, for which Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) wants to present a draft law in the summer, will take effect too late for many.
“If we want to save the clinics, we need more than a reform that will only take effect in a few years,” said the Green politician.
Health experts cite inflation, rising energy costs and wage increases as well as the effects of the corona pandemic as the causes of the poor situation in many clinics. The hospitals could not simply compensate for the rising costs with higher prices.
Brandenburg’s Health Minister Ursula Nonnemacher (Greens) is also hoping for early help for clinics at risk of insolvency: “Many hospitals really have their backs to the wall financially, some are at acute risk of insolvency,” she told the magazine.
According to the hospital barometer of the German Hospital Institute (DKI), 59 percent of the clinics expect to be in the red in 2022. In the previous year it was 43 percent. The proportion of hospitals with a positive annual result will more than halve: from 44 to probably 20 percent, it said at the end of the year. About every fifth hospital (21 percent) assumes a balanced result for 2022. Their share was 13 percent in the previous year.
More than half of the hospitals (56 percent) expect a further deterioration in 2023. Only 17 percent expected an improvement. 27 percent of the clinics assumed that the situation would remain unchanged. © kna/aerzteblatt.de
