Since the beginning of the year, childless people have been paying more into long-term care insurance than parents. However, the Federal Constitutional Court is now complaining that this is not graded according to how many children the insured have. Politicians must now make improvements and make people with two children and older better off.
The Federal Constitutional Court ensures that parents with several children are better off than childless and smaller families when it comes to statutory long-term care insurance. The highest German court in Karlsruhe decided that the contribution rates would have to be adjusted according to the specific number of children by the end of July 2023. On the other hand, the fact that statutory pension and health insurance makes no distinction at all between parents and those without children is okay.
In the case of long-term care insurance, the court had already ruled in 2001 that it was not compatible with the Basic Law for parents to pay the same high contribution rate as childless people – because they made a “generative contribution to the functionality of a pay-as-you-go social security system”. The contribution rates were then adjusted. Since the beginning of this year, that for parents has been 3.05 percent of gross income, and for childless people it has been 3.4 percent.
From the point of view of the judges, however, this does not go far enough: the more children a family has, the greater the effort and the associated costs. “This disadvantage occurs from the second child onwards,” the statement says. “The same contribution burden on parents, regardless of the number of children they have, is not constitutionally justified.” The legislature must remedy this disadvantage. In the statutory pension insurance, the value of bringing up children is particularly rewarded by the recognition of so-called child-rearing periods, decided the First Senate, chaired by Court President Stephan Harbarth.
With regard to statutory health insurance, the judges emphasized that the insured benefited from the services “to a considerable extent” even in childhood and adolescence. In several judgments, the Federal Social Court had already declared that in these two cases no distinctions were made between people with and without children. Several parents defended themselves against these decisions with constitutional complaints, supported by the Family Association of Catholics in the Archdiocese of Freiburg.
