Neoliberal economic and labor market policy, stagnating working income and continuing mass unemployment have withered the extent of employment paying into social security.. the next financing crisis of health insurance is pre-programmed.

Health Reform: Turning away from the Solidarity Principle
by Hans-Ulrich Deppe

In many areas of the public sector of society, changes are now occurring that should be controlled with free enterprise instruments (competition, market and privatization). This is true for health insurance. Economic determinants are always the foundation of health insurance. The questions are: Where are the economic limits? Where are political or ethical questions decisive?

The complete transfer of economic laws and instruments to non-economic realities is termed economization – when the profit calculus (exchange value) gains the upper hand. Persons are reduced to the anthropology of the homo oeconomicus (the egoist person maximizing advantages). This should be criticized.

Criticism of its claim of omnipotence is central here, not a general condemnation of the economy. Whether the instruments are suitable to the reality should be probed, not only the excess of the economy. The economy – when torn out of society – succumbs to the danger of breaking its limits and becoming the norm of cooperative human life. Under the hegemonial conditions of capital, market and competition, society is reduced to the working model of the pure market society.

Health or sickness does not have the character of a marketable commodity. Worldwide there is no health system organized in an exclusively free enterprise way. This results from the following facts:

• Health is a vital good with a high practical value. Health is a collective and public good like air, drinking water, education, road safety and legal security.
• Consumer goods can be turned down, not sickness.
• The patient does not know when and why he becomes sick or what sicknesses he wil