Prostheses Rising numbers make health insurers nervous

Prosthesis: Rising numbers make health insurers nervous.

(30.07.2010) Since 2003, statutory health insurance companies have had to pay about 1.4 million hip joint operations and one million knee operations. Experts are already saying that soon almost every elderly person in Germany will need a prosthetic knee or hip. With an estimated 30 million pensioners in Germany, these are worrying figures. Naturopathic experts ask why health insurances do not pay for methods such as osteopathy or the fascial distortion model, which could be a cost-effective alternative or supplement.

Since 2003, hip operations have increased by eighteen percent and knee surgeries by more than 50 percent and now account for two percent of the total health insurance costs. Without the need for follow-up or rehabilitation, the cost of the first knee or hip prostheses is almost three billion euros per year. The re-operations are to beat with about 550 million euros at the coffers.

If it comes to the reinstatement of the costs in the health system, officials in the health insurance system come up to operating temperature. Because the coffers are startled and puzzle how to curb the increase in costs and case numbers in Germany. Opposite the weekly „The time“ shakes the deputy CEO of Barmer GEK, Dr. Rolf-Ulrich Schlenker, the well-tried phrases from the sleeve. There is review of individual criteria, compensation levels and „performance-based compensation“ and quality the speech.

Alone at the „success-based remuneration“ Among experts, the question arises, for example, how a surgeon should assess the chances of success of an implant in the first place. Even representatives of imaging techniques now admit that the image findings are very often not consistent with the patient's symptoms. Long periods of pain before the implant surgeries often cause certain muscles and connective tissue structures to atrophy. For example, hip patients suffer from lateral hip muscles that have to be laboriously rebuilt after surgery and where the tissue has to be loosened.

Intervention by methods such as osteopathy or the fascial distortion model (FDM) could be useful here in advance, in order to make those affected less painful in hip pain or knee pain and to make the tissues (fascia) more relaxed and adaptable. Especially in the medical profession, the willingness and the commitment are there to lead to a further dissemination of, for example, the fascial distortion model. Courses for physicians in the FDM conducted by A.I.M. - Working Group for Interdisciplinary Medicine Hannover (Head: Prof. Dr. Matthias Fink) at the Hannover Medical School and Hannover Medical Park are regularly booked out and can hardly meet the demand.

Observers have long regretted that the health insurance funds do not jump up here and promote such interdisciplinary initiatives, in order to save costs in the future, instead of ganging up operating doctors and the denture division. (Tf)