Easy to sign, hard to undo

Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” follows the casting of a church bell, and alongside it, verse by verse, the course of a whole human life. While the master founder tests whether the brittle and the soft in the molten metal will fuse, Schiller turns the thought to marriage: “Drum prüfe, wer sich ewig bindet, / Ob sich das Herz zum Herzen findet!” Roughly: so let anyone who binds themselves for ever make sure the hearts truly match. He follows it straight away with a darker line, “Der Wahn ist kurz, die Reu ist lang”: the illusion is short, the regret is long. Schiller never wrote about insurance, yet few money decisions fit his warning as well as the choice between statutory and private health insurance in Germany.

Employees whose salary rises above the threshold for compulsory statutory cover, and people who become self-employed, are allowed to take out private health insurance instead. The Federal Ministry of Health puts the consequence plainly: voluntary members of a statutory fund can move to private cover at any time, while a later return is generally not possible. The way back usually opens only if your circumstances change so that you become compulsorily insured again. From 55 even that route is largely closed. Under section 6(3a) of the Fifth Book of the Social Code (SGB V), you stay exempt if you were not statutorily insured during the previous five years and spent at least half of that time exempt or self-employed, for example.

None of this makes private health insurance a poor choice. It suits many people well, and you choose its benefits deliberately. It does mean the decision will outlast almost any other contract in the household. That is why, in the CapitalPath approach, understanding comes before signing: first a rough idea of the life the next twenty or thirty years might hold, then the tariff. The points worth weighing are set out on the private health insurance page.

Deniz is 34 and designs products for a medical technology firm in Tuttlingen. Since his promotion in the spring his salary has crossed the threshold for the first time, and his colleague Ben, privately insured for years, has twice worked out over lunch in the canteen how much Deniz could save each month. On Tuesday a quote arrives in his inbox. The monthly premium is lower than what he pays his statutory fund now, and Ben reckons it’s the sort of thing you sort out in a lunch break.

That evening Deniz reads the quote at the kitchen table while his girlfriend Lea looks over his shoulder. They barely discuss the price. Lea wants to know what would happen if they had children in a few years and one of them went part-time. Deniz has no idea. Nor does he know what would change if he went freelance one day, which he sometimes talks about, or what the premium might look like when he is sixty. He writes the questions on a sticky note, puts it on the fridge and files the quote away for now.

On Sunday they go to his parents’ for lunch. His father Erol ran his own joinery for almost thirty years and was privately insured the whole time, so Deniz fully expects to be told to go ahead. “I’ve been happy with it,” Erol says, topping up the water. “But I took two months over that decision, and your mother and I went through every situation we could think of. How long have you been thinking about it?” Deniz hesitates. “Since Tuesday.” His father laughs and passes him the bowl. “Then you’ve still got a bit of time.”