A study by the German Hospital Insitute (DKI) shows that German hospitals have particularly low costs compared to other European countries. The costs for inpatient treatment are significantly lower than in comparable western European countries. While in Germany the costs per hospital case are just over 6,000 euros, in Denmark they are more than 7,000 euros and in the Netherlands and Switzerland even over 8,000 euros. Hospitals are therefore neither a cost driver of healthcare expenditure, nor is the German hospital system particularly expensive. The opposite is the case, even if people like to say otherwise.
Against the backdrop of the thesis often used in the media that German healthcare and hospital expenditure is conspicuously high in international comparison and characterised by strong growth, a series of international data and comparative indicators from the OECD and Eurostat were examined in this report.
The result is that, in a European comparison, Germany does not have disproportionately high healthcare expenditure, let alone high expenditure on hospitals. On the contrary, almost all comparable Western European countries spend significantly more on hospital care in relation to their GDP. At around 25 %, the share of hospital expenditure in total healthcare expenditure is far lower than in all relevant neighbouring European countries.
This is despite the fact that Germany does not have as many outpatient care options in hospitals as other countries, which means that more patients have to be treated as inpatients. German hospitals do the latter with great efficiency. In hardly any other leading European industrialised nation are the average inpatient case costs as low as in Germany.
German healthcare expenditure has also not recently risen more sharply overall than in most of its European neighbours. The accelerated increase in healthcare expenditure as a percentage of GDP since 2017 is not predominantly due to the disproportionate rise in healthcare expenditure, but rather to the underproportionate development of the German economy, particularly since the coronavirus pandemic.
Article published on the BDPK website on 21.02.2025
