[Cass]

Not in Germany, they don't. Barmer is a "gesetzliche Krankenkasse"/public insurance, which means most of their members' premiums are legally limited to a certain percentage of their members' income, and while they can and do raise their premiums occasionally, that's always a topic of political debate and needs a better justification than "a very small percentage of our members need expensive exo-skeletons now."

They have no ability to raise premiums on specific members with high healthcare costs.

[schleck8]

This must be wrong because US health insurance is evil /s

[random314]

I was talking about US insurance where profit percentage is fixed, hence reducing bottomline reduces profits.

[GeckoEidechse]

Well the article is a about German health insurance so without mentioning it explicitly it's not clear that you were talking about the US system :P

[defrost]

There's more to the world than the parochial ways of central north america so such locale specific observations deserve to be qualified for the benefit of the wider HN readership.