Study: Private health insurance premiums for older insurees are similar to those for younger insurees

For the first time, a study provides well-founded data that serve as a basis for discussions about sharp and abrupt rises of private health insurance (PKV) premiums, particularly for older insurees. According to the study, long-term private healthcare insurees do not necessarily pay higher premiums than younger insurees. The study is based on long-term data from members of the largest private health insurance in Germany, which was collected over the last 20 years. The study includes approximately 716,000 people who were born in 1974 or earlier and are members of Debeka, the largest German private health insurance. The IGES Institute evaluated the insuree data on behalf of the company. A prerequisite was that members had been fully insured continuously between the years 1995 and 2015.

Berlin, 14. September 2016 (IGES Institut) - “The demand for digital health products has been growing continuously. However, market access is currently not transparent. We need procedures that simultaneously do justice to both this dynamic sector and patient safety,” says Dr. Karsten Neumann, Managing Director of the IGES Institute. In contrast to medical devices and drugs, the prevailing factors contributing to product risks are not the medical effects but the data processing and the information transmitted to the users. Currently, digital applications such as health apps fall under the German Medical Devices Law (MPG), which, however, was designed for a different kind of product.