Health Systems: Research & Counselling

Health Issues: Germany

An unknown quantity to many outside of the country, Germany, and its regimentally strict laws concerning health care and those eligible for it, is, sadly, a tangled mess of supposed essential bureaucracy: government politics which seep through the cracks of every gap in society, permeating and influencing lives, irrelevant of class or culture. From getting a job to renting a house, every single aspect comes back to the bedrock that is health care. Without health care in Germany—something which generates an unthinkably large sum of money every minute—a person simply cannot exist in society.

Like many countries, Germany’s privatized health-care system—the country has no N.H.S. to speak of; the entire country pays into private health care in some way or another, though in some cases they may recieve government help—is mandatory to be a part of; that is not to say that those not wishing to pay for it can’t opt out, but that if they do so then they will be unable to get a job–effectively invisible. Upon registering in Germany a person may be eligible for health care, but there in lies another problem: without private German health care on first arrival in the country—something which is often impossible to get without first having work—a person will struggle greatly to find a job and open a bank account. Without being able to find a job or having access to ’Konto’, getting accommodation can also prove almost impossible.

Germany still, after all these years, unfortunately has its head buried in the sand as far as national health policy is concerned: the leaders of the country are adamantly against the growing levels of illegal workers—so called ‘black work’ or ‘schwartz arbeit’: work which is not declared but is freely available—yet they are unwilling to concede that it is their own policy which forces those who can’t get a job—because of lack of health insurance—to turn to it.