ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the most important health care sectors within the statutory health insurance system. It deals with co-payments within this system and the private health insurance sector. The chapter focuses on the relationship between health care costs as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), sickness fund contribution rates, and the proportion of wages compared to GDP. The German health care system is organized around a tri-partite system of a statutory and social insurance which covers nearly 90 per cent of the population. The cost-containment measures in Germany have, then, consisted of organizational reforms designed to rationalize the delivery of services rather than ration them. German ambulatory medicine is almost exclusively carried out in private offices of physicians working on their own premises, rather than by hospital out-patient clinics. Although many of the regulations relating to ambulatory physicians are relevant to the dental care sector of German health care, there is a major difference.
