Free citizen tests for everyone will no longer be available from July. If you want to take a test, you have to pay immediately. However, this does not go far enough for the panel doctors – they are calling for “these nonsensical tests” to be completely abolished.
The chairman of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV), Andreas Gassen, has called for the corona citizen tests to be stopped completely. “These nonsensical tests must be abolished,” Gassen told the “Bild” newspaper. “They are far too expensive, the bureaucratic effort is huge and the epidemiological significance is zero.”
It was a “completely pointless event to test healthy people with questionable quality without cause,” Gassen continued. PCR tests in patients with symptoms, on the other hand, are important in order to clearly demonstrate corona infections.
The Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians announced in a letter to Federal Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach from the SPD that they would no longer be able to “bill and pay out” for corona citizen tests. One does not want to be “responsible for making payments on statements with one eye, the correctness of which they cannot begin to check”.
According to the new test regulation that came into force on Thursday, the citizen tests that were previously free of charge for everyone are now only available to a limited extent. There are still free tests for children up to five years of age, pregnant women in the first three months, visitors to hospitals and nursing homes, household members of infected people and residents of integration assistance facilities.
All those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons can continue to be tested free of charge. Otherwise, a test costs three euros.
Lauterbach defended the new test regulation against criticism on Thursday. He would have liked to have left the tests completely free, said Lauterbach in the ZDF “Morgenmagazin”. “But we couldn’t afford that anymore.” He considers the additional bureaucracy associated with the tests to be “manageable”.
