Health insurance in Germany continues with no change if you lose a job. We do know very well that people who become unemployed are at an increased risk of becoming ill, and therefore becoming unemployed is about the worst time to lose health insurance. So therefore, everyone who loses a job remains in exactly the same insurance system he is in.

The German system is way less fair than it is expected to be, and the difference is becoming bigger. The private system, with its privilege to pay doctors and hospitals better, is basically putting the whole system at jeopardy, because many first-class hospitals and first-class physicians are wasting their time on trivial cases of privately insured and are no longer accessible for the difficult cases from the public system, despite [the fact] that the hospitals and also the education of those professionals is paid for by public money.

The same drugs are way cheaper in Germany than in America because, obviously, if all sickness funds negotiate with the drug companies for a single price, then the market power of the sickness funds is fully used. So therefore you would expect the prices to be lower for the drugs in Germany, and this is exactly what you see, at least for non-generic drugs.

Health insurance in Germany continues with no change if you lose a job. We do know very well that people who become unemployed are at an increased risk of becoming ill, and therefore becoming unemployed is about the worst time to lose health insurance. So therefore, everyone who loses a job remains in exactly the same insurance system he is in.

I think the Scandinavian health systems are better when it comes to preventative care than the German system, because in the Scandinavian systems, the government is really more active in defining treatment, goals and defining health priorities. The German system is a competitive system with little government intervention. The price for this is that the government cannot set a health agenda. And the Scandinavian systems have little competition, so you often do have waiting lists. But on the other hand, you then have the government which can push for prevention.

I think, unfortunately, many opinion leaders in Germany - including government officials, politicians, social service bureaucrats and so forth - they are in the private system, and they get paid the private insurance by their employer. So for them this is the best of two worlds: They have some more expensive and privileged access, but they do not have to pay for it themselves. This is a system which is both inefficient and unfair at the same time, but it is defended by those who profit from this system, and this includes many opinion leaders and many politicians.

The quality of health care in Germany is not as good as people sometimes believe it to be. We have problems with chronic diseases. The German system allows too many hospitals and specialists to treat chronic diseases. We do not have enough volume in many institutions to deliver good quality, and we do have fairly strict separations ... between primary physicians, office specialists and hospital specialists. But I think the quality problems can be solved in the next couple of years, and we have made major progress in diabetes, coronary artery disease and pulmonary disease care.