The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care
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Sepsis is a systemic response to severe infection in critically ill patients and is among the most frequent causes of death in intensive care medicine. Every year between 44,000 and 95,000 persons suffer from this illness in Germany. With the help of a retrospective electronic chart analysis in three adult ICUs of three university hospitals we calculated by a bottom-up approach the direct costs of these patients yielding per patient costs of 23,297 euros on average. ⋯ The indirect costs range between 2,622 and 5,660 million euros. Productivity loss due to premature death does account for the largest part of the indirect costs. In conclusion, severe sepsis imposes annual costs between 3,647 and 7,874 million euros to the German society.
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In 1984 Singapore adopted a system of Medisave accounts, individually owned accounts used to pay for many of the health care expenditures that in Germany would normally be covered by the obligatory or private health insurance. The fact that people are spending their own money rather than that of a third-party insurer has helped to curtail Singapore's health care costs, which were about 2.6% of gross domestic product in 1999 (Germany: 10.5%). Even with these low expenditures, the income of Singapore physicians is about the same in relation to average wages as physician income in Germany or the United States, and patients have easy access to such technology as computerised axial tomography, organ transplants and bypass surgery.