GDP, Wages, Employment, and Demography: What drives the Financing of Health Insurance? Factor Analysis of the German Statutory Health Insurance 1996-2016

Thomas Neusius

No 4/2018, wifin Working Paper Series from RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Wiesbaden Institute of Finance and Insurance (wifin)

Abstract: For the German statutory health insurance (SHI), the development of health spending and of the contribution relevant income is analyzed between 1996 and 2016 with respect to the relevant economic and demographic driving factors. The analysis allows identification and quantification of the main drivers of the contribution rate (CR) being the percentage of income that has to be paid as contribution to SHI. It turns out that the most dominant driver for an increasing CR is the aging of the insureds. Additionally, the growing employment also had a pushing effect on the CR as the number of contribution paying SHI members did not grow in equal measure. Only a moderate contribution can be ascribed to the reduced growth of the contribution relevant income.

Keywords: demography; health insurance; medical inflation; health expenditure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 I13 I15 J11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/266224/1/wifi-wp04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:wifinw:42018

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in wifin Working Paper Series from RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Wiesbaden Institute of Finance and Insurance (wifin) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().