Germany’s federal health minister, Nina Warken of the CDU, said that the nursing care funds should increase their payments to care homes, with the aim of reducing the amount residents currently have to pay out of pocket.
“In order to counter the rising individual contributions and to continue guaranteeing good care” she explained to the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”.
The nursing care reform slated for 2027 may, according to the paper, include a rule that ties the payments from the funds to care homes to the yearly inflation rate. Presently these adjustments are not made routinely.
Warken added that the dynamic of benefits must become more reliable for all parties involved. She proposes a permanent indexing of payments to the inflation rate so that “the deterioration of services is mitigated and the increase in private shares is restrained”. With such a mechanism every stakeholder can adapt, and no “unsustainable political over‑topping” would occur, she told the newspaper.
The minister refers to the upcoming reform as a “total package”. The foundation for the changes is a set of recommendations published in December by a federal-state working group on the “Future Pact for Nursing Care”.
According to a study by the Scientific Institute of Private Health Insurance (WIP), the proposed dynamic adjustment and the limitation of residents’ out‑of‑pocket contributions to €1,000 per month (the “care‑cap”) would cost the nursing care funds about €137.6 billion up to 2040. The “FAZ” notes that this sum is roughly equivalent to the pension package adopted in 2025, which had been strongly opposed by the “Young Group” within the EU parliamentary faction.
