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Minister of Health Lauterbach (archive photo): "We don't know exactly who owns these care facilities."
Photo:
IMAGO/Jürgen Heinrich
Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach considers the privatization of care facilities to be a mistake in retrospect.
"In retrospect, I would have thought it would be right if care had simply remained a municipal task," said the SPD politician in an interview with journalist Günter Wallraff for the RTL format "Team Wallraff - Now even more!".
At the moment, however, he sees no legal way of enforcing this: »The private investors cannot simply be expropriated.
That's not legally feasible.«
"We don't know exactly who owns these care facilities, who is making a profit with these care facilities at the moment," Lauterbach complained.
The aim must now be to ensure that “the quality of care is the same everywhere – no matter who owns the facility”.
Operators often change owners – and accumulate debt
Observers consider the frequent change of ownership of home operators to be a major problem in care.
According to a study by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is close to the Greens, this often means that the debt burden of care providers increases after a takeover – simply because the new owners burden the operators with the costs of the takeover.
In addition, the companies would be forced to sell their own real estate, whereupon they would have to rent it expensively.
For example, the rental costs at the home operator Alloheim rose by around 50 percent from 2018 to 2019 alone.
sol/dpa
