German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
noyb.eu
noyb.eu
A country like the Netherlands has its own issues (mainly housing) but doesn't have the myriad of pain points you can find in Germany like Schufa, anti-customer contract rules, or public healthcare inaccessible despite paying more than 400€/month for it as a single individual.
And where tenure ranks above skills or experience. Especially if unions are involved.
But, unlike a lot of things we write for Americans, that one turned out to be actually workable, usable in their (rather large) product, and runs happily to this day almost 5 years later. I count it as a success and attribute it mainly to this boring, overly conservative and procedure-ridden work process.
But yes, i agree, that for software projects, virtues of this approach are more limited than in "hard" engineering, and probably do not outweigh downsides in many cases.
That's a pretty new thing though (been getting worse for the last 10 yrs). And the person responsible for the legislature that caused this change is the current health minister.
Also... 400€? It's a percentage of your salary. And you're omitting that the employer pays the same amount, so you're effectively paying 800€ at the very least.
Could you please explain that a bit more?
A somewhat recent German video (2yrs old) is "Pflege katastrophe - exposed". But ARTE , DW and ZDF all have reported on it at this point
The controversy about diabetis patients getting amputations over simple treatments is a pretty well known symptom of this revamp, as operations get a very high payout
That makes it worse! Not better.
If you are a really high earner you can opt out and pay a private risk-based premium instead.
As an American I choose to ignore this and pretend that everywhere else has perfect healthcare and government.
Many people at that income bracket opt for private insurance, because it will be cheaper and provide you better care.
You need to know your future, as it's more or less a decision for life.
Not everybody is employed.
Private insurance matters most for specialists that don't (aren't allowed to) have (or want) a public insurance license.
You can certainly argue about how good the healthcare system is in the end, but it isn't categorically inaccessible. And if you pay 400 EUR/month you're earning enough money and can choose the private health system if you prefer that.
The credit ranking also works in very different ways than in the US, so I wouldn't compare them directly. I'm not sure what you mean by anti-consumer contract rules.
The issue is not getting in - but getting back out before you retire and don't have enough available income to pay the rates anymore.
The cost for public healthcare is scaled by income, and is limited around 400 EUR. It's a bit higher now, but I would suspect that the OP is not necessarily talking about the most current values here and is hitting the older limit and therefore earning more than the "Beitragsbemessungsgrenze".
Also Freelancers and self-employed need to pay full contribution of 900 €, not "just" a half.
Company "contributions" are just a government conspiracy to gaslight you into thinking you pay less taxes & contributions than you actually pay.
Where NL is utterly ineffective is when it comes to vague symptoms. Until it is perfectly clear what is wrong you're going to be seriously frustrated because the diagnostic machinery isn't really all that effective, when in other countries they'd spend a fortune to find out what's wrong with you in NL unless it's 100% clear you're going to have a hard time getting the care that you need.
I blame Calvijn, NL seems to have a misplaced sense of reduced expression of emotion resulting in an expectation to tough things out rather than to deal with them and for some reason doctors seem to see complaints without a direct relatable cause as an attack of hysterics rather than as something to investigate. If you come from a different background you're going to find this a very difficult thing to deal with.
What other countries are those?
Sweden here, I hear the same things. I have had good experiences with health care here as my problems have been "normal" and straight forward.
But what other countries? Really, name one.
Same with computers.
You want to fix a straight forward problem or a vague one?
A decent chunk of those are exclusive to Germany, or at least far from the norm in the EU or Europe in general. For instance digitalisation varies wildly between countries, but Germany is definitely one of the most embarrassingly behind countries. Taxation also varies (e.g. Bulgaria and Estonia have flat income taxes). Federalism isn't a thing in most European countries too.
This is super close to my early 2010's ACA experiences. Even when a poor earner could scrape up enough to buy a plan, the deductible made it unusable.
Policy pricing was exorbitant for $12k/yr earners but dropped enough for 22k/yr that a few plans were buyable. The challenge was coming up with another $somethingthousand to cover the deductible.
There was a sharp drop-off in plan pricing at 32k/yr and some mid-grade plans were in reach. IIRC deductibles were lower on those plans and they may have been usable (or nearly so).
What struck then. Of the news orgs cheering/damning the ACA, zero of them ever covered how pricing dropped as income rose. I assume that's because pricing was only ever disclosed to folks who completed the lengthy signup process - and news folks found it too daunting to experiment with.
One of the main current criticisms of the system is that it can be very difficult to get appointments with specialists compared to people with private health insurance.
Sure if you’re in a car crash and urgently need care they will help you without going bankrupt but anything less urgent good luck getting an appointment this week / month / year
As a relative of a person with a chronic disease I can tell you that on the one hand if we are not bankrupt it is because of public healthcare, and on the other I'm proud of contributing through my taxes so that anybody in need can have the same treatment irrespective of their economic situation.
I don't mind paying my fair share of tax if it means I get good value out of it, but the state of our healthcare here means that in practice the public healthcare system is no longer fit for purpose, so we are being forced to pay for a system that doesn't work and end up having to go private (and thus pay again) when we do need timely healthcare.
I am generally in favor of fair, progressive taxation to ensure everyone has a good social safety net, but the taxation should be fair (it's no longer the case in the UK, since tax brackets haven't been adjusted for inflation) and the services paid for by those taxes should provide good value.
The danger with services funded by taxes as opposed to a private enterprise operating in a free market is that private enterprises are bound by competitive pressure - if they are delivering terrible service and stuffing their pockets with the money, you are free not to do business with them and a potential competitor (that stuffs their pockets a little less) can come along and get your business instead.
With tax-funded services, this pressure doesn't exist, so there's no incentive for politicians (and everyone else in the value chain) to deliver good service, since people generally can't opt out of taxes. This means that even if a service is currently good, there's no guarantee it will remain so since the pressure for it to remain isn't there. Thus, when you see high taxation, it's reasonable to be worried whether the service provided by those taxes is any good and whether it will remain so in the future.
Without proper regulation and enforcement capitalism devolves to monopolies and oligopolies and eliminate competition and subdue market forces.
There are many valid scenarios where competition is lacking, but generally speaking the reason it’s lacking is due to regulation/law making it impossible.
Telecoms for example is impossible because the incumbents have exclusive control of the physical infrastructure (poles/ducts under the street) or spectrum auctions where the price makes it impossible for a new entrant to enter.
Tech network effects are maintained by copyright law being abused to prevent adversarial interoperability.
If you had no regulation, they would simply form cartels or merge to create a monopoly.
1) There should be "forces" counterbalancing the move toward monopolies
2) It should be okay for the service to fail/die and/or it should degrade gracefully.
For example book publishing is a wonderful field that can gain from free market dynamics while prison management is a terrible field for free market dynamics.
While a dying publishing enterprise might print less books at a lower quality with deceptive marketing (and that is sorta okay) a dying prison management enterprise will squeeze every ounce of dignity/health/safety out of its wards.
Market dynamics for the economy are analogous to natural selection for evolution: both can produce wonderful things but they will require many more to die horribly.
This is not a statement against markets but I am calling for this tradeoff to be considered along with many other.
I wonder if the solution there would be to force politicians and everyone involved to exclusively use government-provided services - so as a condition of going into politics, you can't use private healthcare, your kids can't go to private schools, and you need to spend a day every year in a random prison and so on. Then it would mean the decision-makers got at least some incentive to make sure these services are functional and fit for purpose.
What you should have are companies that offer their best prices/services to the government out of fear that they'll be passed over and those highly valuable contracts will be awarded to their competitors who do better. Governments are incentivized to select the best companies to award those contracts to because they risk being voted out if people are unhappy with the level of service they're getting for their tax dollars.
Prisoners can't kick politicians out of office when they're unhappy about the state of the prisons so that's a huge issue with prisons in general, but private prisons have another issue which is profit. Whatever it costs to keep dangerous people locked up, private prisons need all of that money plus they must extract a bunch of extra money from the public just to stuff their pockets with. If private prisons want to keep prices low to the public but also want to keep filling their pockets with money they need to provide substandard care to the people they are responsible for. A non-private prison needs only what it costs to do the job and nothing more.
This requires a functional quality control system. It seems like it's cheaper to undermine/bribe (or just let decay whatever there is) the quality control system than to actually do better.
> because they risk being voted out if people are unhappy with the level of service
Votes only work if people are properly represented and have good alternatives to vote for, which doesn't seem to be the case in most countries despite them being considered democracies. Keep in mind that the leader of the DPRK is also "elected".
1. NI means that the real standard rate on earned income is substantially higher than the "income tax" rate. it is also not fair that unearned income is exempt from it. 2. Lots of purchase taxes, which are disproportionately paid by people with moderate incomes. People on low incomes spend a higher proportion in necessities which are (rightly) subject to lower levels. The more money you have (beyond a certain point) the less you spend on things subject to these taxes. 3. Too many loopholes.
> so we are being forced to pay for a system that doesn't work and end up having to go private (and thus pay again) when we do need timely healthcare.
Some of the NHS is good. NHS dentists can be very hard to find and waiting lists are long. Waiting times can be long too. Reform is prevented by the fear of a US type system and I think many people think that is the only alternative (and seem not to realise how things operate in most other developed countries).
Genuine question, what do other countries do differently? The way I see it (and described in my original comment) is that the underlying factors behind the decline of government services (no accountability, no incentive to use tax money efficiently) are common across many countries.
Some countries may get away with it for now because they're still "early", but if there is no pressure to do well it's just a matter of time before they too suffer the same fate?
Essentially funding to services are being reduced to pay for tax reductions, until at some point the quality declines significantly, which is taken as the argument that private enterprise would deliver a much better service at lower cost. Services/infrastructure are then sold and a low price and after a short while costs for services go up, but because they are now private enterprises raising prices it is "the market".
The reason why the UK is worse I believe it's due to the political system which results in essentially 2 dominant parties with very little differences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_health_insurance
Singapore has an individual fund system if I understand it correctly, and that provides extremely good value for money.
One big difference is that these systems are less centralised and therefore less bureaucratic, less prone to political tinkering, and they reduce the problems of lack of accountability and incentives for efficiency.
People forget, the young'uns are the ones you'll be counting on as you get older. Best to give them the best education possible, IMHO.
That is not the case for Germany. We have - even with all its shortcomings - a decent education system that's largely free and accessible for everyone, a decent healthcare system, a decent public transport system on local, regional and federal system, and a very decent social security network that covers unemployment, pension and elderly care.
The US in contrast has neither: parents have to pay five digits worth of money just for the birth of a child, pay through their nose for insurance, public schools are horribly underfunded, universities require six digits worth of debt, there's no high-speed rail worth the name, if you're unemployed you better have some savings, you have to take care about your 401k, and the best way if you need elderly care is to off yourself with a gun.
The only thing where the US actually is in front of Germany is allowing you to get a gun to off yourself. Here in Germany, it's almost impossible to own a gun, so people love to off themselves by jumping in front of a train, creating a huge mess for everyone else.
In Germany, i'm paying more than 1150€ per month as single (and im not privately insured but publicly)
For eg: if you work for a Swiss or US employer and make more than 69k(?), say 100k, as a freelancer, and have a family, you have to pay around 14%(upper limit somewhere around 1000) of the income as health insurance contribution.
I think it is costly. It is difficult to digest for me that the health insurance costs more than housing.
Free of charge in Germany
> If you have insurance your maximum cost out of pocket for the calendar year is between 5 and 15 thousand dollars (insurance covers everything above it).
In Germany, insurance covers everything over 0€. It depends on the insurance whether you have to pay extra for individual treatments (treatment methods without, or with disputed scientific evidence) or not. Rarely more than 100€. If expenses for illnesses exceed a certain amount in a year (about 3000€), it can be deducted from taxes.
> Health insurance in America costs between $500-$1000 a month for an entire family.
In Germany, it depends on your income how much the insurance costs for the entire family. 500-1000€ is also possible in Germany. But without all the extra expenses, negotiations with doctors, clinic, insurer, and bankruptcies...
Paid solely by taxes instead of some taxes and some out of pocket
Yes. But you wait >6 months to see a specialist. And Germany has not the same level of health care than the US. Sorry to break the news to you.
Yes, Germany has not the same level of health care. Most of the time it’s better than the US. According to studies and data. All sources are not from Germany:
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/best-h...
„Germany would have tied Switzerland had we averaged our rankings of the nations instead of using head-to-head matchups in a bracket system (Switzerland eliminated Germany in the first round). It’s an example of how close the voting was.“
Wow!
Sorry to break the news to you.
I don't care what the internet says. I know from my own experience it is 6 months, at least for some categories. Some sources say 30 days. A joke! I could call the office of my average XYZ doctor now and ask. And it will be 6 months, for sure.
"Most of the time it’s better than the US. "
The US has a lower live expectancy. Whatever the reasons may be. While this is concerning and not good, as long as you have a good insurance, Germany can not match the standard of US health care. Trust me on that one. With dentists it may be a different thing.
Yes, if you are poor or unemployed, your access to health care is likely much better than in the USA. But otherwise, not so much.
You also mention "at least for some categories", then you mention that "you could call the average XYZ doctor", as it that was applying to all categories. You seem to be generalising out of emotions, to be honest.
As I mentioned, I know about a range of categories and I never heard of 6 months. Your example seems very specific.
But how can you have anything to deduct if insurance covers everything over $0?
In Germany all of that is being covered by the government insurance scheme. The only thing you have to pay is stuff like a private room for postnatal recovery time [1]. Oh and you get a very long time paid post birth to recover and bond with your child. No such nonsense as giving birth and having to work the next day like it's common in the US.
> If you have insurance your maximum cost out of pocket for the calendar year is between 5 and 15 thousand dollars (insurance covers everything above it).
We don't have that at all, insurance covers everything, you never even see a bill or have to deal with stuff like "in network". The only thing is a 5-10€ co-pay per prescription (utter nonsense if you ask me, it was introduced as a "cost control" measure to prevent people from... diverting medication? idk, it's ridiculous but small enough that it's harmless).
> Bankruptcy is much more problematic in Europe for the individual. Americans can keep their assets in a Chapter 13 bankruptcy.
Agreed on that one. It's also a huge contributing factor into why Americans have it easier to start up side hustles.
> Health insurance in America costs between $500-$1000 a month for an entire family.
Assuming I were the sole earner and my wife would be a SAHM with an arbitrary number of children, I'd (at a gross wage of 52k/y) pay 340€ a month to health insurance and my employer another 340€, so in total (including a per-insurance surcharge of, in my case, .5%) my healthcare costs are capped at about 700€ - for all of us.
On top of that we'd get, like all parents in Germany, "Kindergeld" of 250€/month per childpaid by the government to assist in child rearing.
Pretty awesome if you ask me. I honestly don't know how y'all survive.
Ok, but you agree, don't you, that $3000 is quite different from "parents have to pay five digits worth of money just for the birth of a child"? That is off by an order of magnitude.
> No such nonsense as giving birth and having to work the next day like it's common in the US.
I think you should stop consuming so much media from Russia Today :) Or maybe re-consider the trustworthiness of wherever you read that.
The fact is that, at the federal level, Americans may take 12 weeks (unpaid) time off work after giving birth under the FMLA, and it is prohibited to retaliate against an employee for taking that time.
Additionally, the majority of Americans live in states which mandate paid time off after giving birth, (usually 8 to 12 weeks) plus additional unpaid time. California, to use the most populous state as an example, mandates 8 weeks of paid time, plus 28 weeks unpaid. New York, on the opposite side of the country, goes even farther by mandating 12 weeks paid time.
Part of the reason you may be confused is that this is not always explicitly named as "maternity time". It is often called as "disability leave", and nearly all disability statutes include recovery from pregnancy as a disability.
Unless you are maybe trying to argue that Europeans are legally prohibited to work the day after giving birth, you are way off base here.
We also have a small problem with fentanyl.
There is also the practical matter that the US is a continent-sized country and regional effects matter. Some US States have life expectancy on par with the best European countries despite the anomalously high fatal injury rates among young people.
In terms of actual medical outcomes -- survival rates for cancer, cardiovascular events, trauma medicine, etc -- the UK is quite a bit worse than the US. The only countries that stand out as consistently competing on medical outcomes are France and Switzerland.
1. One might pay up to $15K out-of-pocket for childbirth.
2. If you can't pay it, you have to go out-of-band to seek a non-standard procedure of taking care of the debt. The system is not otherwise built to handle a situation that's probably pretty common given the expenses involved.
3. If all else fails, file for bankruptcy.
All just to have a child.
What you've described is not "not so bad", but rather the plot of a bad movie from the 70s about how corporations have taken over the country and we all live in this dystopian hell where you have to give all of your assets to the corporation to be allowed to have a child. Only it's not a bad movie from the 70s, it's the U. S. healthcare system.
And I don't know what kind of low-end plan one gets for $1000/month for a whole family, but I'd bet real money that the deductible would make my eyes water.
Anyway, comparing earning 175k USD to 162.37k EUR:
Germany, married with 2 children, Stay At Home Mom Scenario, Tax Category 3, Berlin Region:
Solidarity + Salary Tax is EUR 40.428,00 Pension Insurance: 8.314,20 € Unemployment Insurance: 1.162,20 € Care Insurance: 900,45 €
Total: 50.805 € = $54,706 before health insurance
Virginia, USA, same scenario as above, incl. 2 child tax credit of $4000, four state exemptions: FICA + Federal + State Tax - Child Care Credit: $44,162-$4,000 = $40,162 before health insurance
Germany costs $14,544 a year more for a family with two kids before health insurance. To be fair though, the differences are lesser for most Germans, as almost no common jobs pay over 120k EUR gross.
Be aware that this is not true!
What insurance-speak calls max out of pocket is not what a normal person thinks max out of pocket means.
If you have a year of high medical bills you can easily pay much more out of your real pocket than your so-called "max out of pocket" in the insurance paperwork.
That is because the insurance company only credits what they feel like it towards their accounting of max out of pocket, not what you actually paid.
I don't have an insurance bill handy here to quote numbers but in their monthly or quarterly statements you can find what you have to pay and what they credit against your tally of yearly out of pocket. The latter is often less than the former.
> Health insurance in America costs between $500-$1000 a month for an entire family.
You're off by a lot. About $3500/mo here in CA for my family. Employers usually pay a good portion of that (but it varies) but if you go unemployed on COBRA, it's all out of pocket.
And since we're trading anecdotes I've found US Healthcare to be the best compared to the 3 european countries I've lived in before.
They have the advantage that the country is so small. Us Germans however have to deal with the fact that we have the 5th largest country of Europe of which a lot of is settled and has to be supported by the entire population.
And in any case, Swiss taxes aren't that much lower than Germany's either - average tax load in the country is ~29% [1], Germany is at 33.9% [2]. Switzerland's total load may be even higher because the German figure includes social security payments, Statista for Switzerland is only taxes.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1176146/umfra...
[2] https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/zahlen-und-fakten/soziale-situ...
I'm certain your two sources are not measuring the same thing. Swiss taxes are much lower. Median income in Germany is 43k which results in a tax rate of 34% in bawu. Median income in Switzerland is 78k, that in Zürich gives a tax rate of roughly 12% (!!!). Of course in Switzerland all health insurance is private so you end up having to pay more but this does not increase with more income!
Anyways the idea that the tax burden is the same is completely laughable.
There is plenty to complain about but pensions and retirement is one area that the US does comparatively well.
I give your Universities a 2-3 (On a scale 1 Top, 5 fail). High schools are getting worse and worse due to the immigrants. So you would want to send your kid to a school without many immigrants, mainly due to language barriers.
"a decent healthcare system" Again, I give you a 2-3. More and more people are sucking services, fewer people pay in. Hey, alone 1 Million Ukrainians are insured, while less than 25% have a job. How long do you wait to see a specialist? >6 months!
"a decent public transport system on local, regional and federal system" Again grade 2-3. You have a functioning public transport system. But ask Switzerland what they think about it. Or look at China if you want to learn something about bullet trains.
"and a very decent social security network that covers unemployment, pension and elderly care."
Is on the brink of collapse. Pensions are great. For state employees. The rest gets retirement benefits. They are compared to the EU very low.
I don't have health insurance by the way. Germany has to take care of so many immigrants. Nothing left for me. And try to compete with them to find an apartment. The government pays for them. And the government is never late with payments, hence landlords prefer this.
This literally sounds like regurgitated shit from far-right politicians rather than thought-out analysis based on real statistics. In fact I would go so far as to suspect astroturfing.
1. a) 0 Universities among the top 10: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universiti... (In most other rankings, German universities rank much worse)
b) sinking high school performance: https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-n... The collapse coincides with the arrival of refugees under Merkel....
c) Many immigrants in school. Hint: You can't teach math or chemistry if the majority of the kids don't speak German https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/integration-an-manchen-schule...
2. a) Currently don't find a better article. Biggest problem compared to China. Germany has the same tracks for bullet trains, local trains and freight trains. Often the bullet trains run a 120 or 160 km/h https://www.businessinsider.de/tech/warum-es-ultraschnelle-z...
b) Switzerland complaining that German late trains destroying their time tables: https://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/schweizer-experte-droht-d...
3.)
a) Waiting for several months (around 6, based on own experience) to see a specialist: https://www.sr.de/sr/sr3/themen/panorama/saarland_warten_auf...
b) Retirement, as percentage of former income, EU comparison: https://www.merkur.de/leben/geld/deutschland-rente-vergleich...
Forgot the last point:
4. Examples https://www.bw24.de/baden-wuerttemberg/neid-debatte-vermiete... https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/fluechtlinge-dubiose-geschaef...
And personal experience from friends of mine who are landlords.
You're being a bit unfair, to be honest.
It is a big world my friend. And if millions come to use these services but don't pay in, the services get thinner and thinner. 1 Million Ukrainians came to German. Less than 25% have a job. The rest is financed by the taxpayer. Money, Rent, Health insurance...
Edit:
It reminds me of a Third Reich joke. An old woman goes into a map shop and looks at a globe.
She asks the sales person: What is this big blue land on the globe?
The sales person says: This is the USA.
Old lady: And this huge Red area, what is this?
The sales person says: This is the Soviet Union.
Old lady: And this tiny brown spot, what is this?
The sales person says: This is our Third Reich.
Old lady: Does the Fuehrer know this?
-----------
I hope you get what I am trying to say.
I really don't wanna get into this populist debate, which is really annoying lately as it seems to be our biggest issue in the world, but ... the 70-80 years old people (probably) worked in the country, they contributed to their own country, and should be treated with some respect or decency and not just as a cost.
Now the coming generations can deal with the fallout.
Seriously, we have frequent protests against a new city district here, and you exclusively see college students who know jack shit about life and old folks around there.
We have all the possible available knowledge at our disposal today, right now, and look at how much crap we still do.
[0] https://www.oecd.org/health/Expenditure-by-disease-age-and-g...
https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/politik/ukrainer-...
18% in Germany is also still better than Switzerland and Austria (14%), but I agree it’s not good.
Too much poor processes preventing these people from working, very frustrating.
And while 0.9% can be treated just as a number, each one of these individuals has a unique story and deserves our empathy and understanding.
[0] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2023-08-25/ukr...).
High tax rates and, in fact, ANY taxes area a negative. However, that negative is (hopefully) offset by the positives that the things those taxes go to pay for provide.
after receiving the same services for no or minimal tax i also find it very disturbing that people still think high taxation is necessary.
singapore. low-ish taxes, excellent public services.
there are others.
In Italy it's the state/regions that take your taxes and pay the health system.
[0]: https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/fileadmin/Dateie...
Typical emotional manipulation...
> that high taxation is seen as a negative aspect of Europe. I lived in Italy, France and Germany, and I enjoyed public healthcare and education of very high standard at very affordable prices, and free in the limit that one cannot afford to pay for them.
...coupled with an utterly illogical (and factually incorrect[1]) non-argument.
You can have these things without high taxation, if the system that implements them is efficient. It's not.
In the Netherlands we have BKR, which is less all-encompassing than SCHUFA, but also needed to be fined before giving proper right to access under the GDPR: https://edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2020/national-cred...
Given that everyone uses IBAN, and it works great, I strongly disagree.
>private healthcare if you want decent treatments
Your mileage may vary, but I was very impressed with the speed and ease of acquiring healthcare under a public plan. The lack of paperwork for seeing a new doctor is astonishing. The lack of copays, SOBs, and all that is like a breath of fresh air, and is worth copying in the US. Heck I once saw a doctor for something and simply gave my card, and saw the doctor in the next hour, and she decided I needed an ultrasound...and did the ultrasound in 5 minutes herself. In the US, this would have been a multi-week ordeal with multiple rounds of paperwork and visits to different offices.
My wife also had a C-section at a Berlin hospital and the care was competent and 100% covered by our public insurance. In the US couples requiring a C-section can expect $20k+ of debt.
I've been living in Germany for about a decade, and it is still behind in many of these items from when I left the US, and having a friend that recently moved from Germany to NL, he was blown away at how convenient and just not-hostile so many day to day interactions with governments and businesses were.
Like - big picture, I'm very happy in Germany, but certain things are still very archaic and sometimes needlessly so.
Sweden is highly digitalized, we pay on our phones, pay taxes on our phones, do government stuff on phone or webbrowser. No stores do cash anymore (also a negative)
High taxes is a positive if used right
Despite Finland reapeatedly making headlines (including on HN) about being a Nordic welfare state.
Germans are typically complaining from a high level.
Source: Members of the wider family living in both countries. Some over 80 and needing a lot of healthcare services.
(I hear general practioners can be a problem in poorer areas in the East. My experiences are from a prosperous area in the West.)
Edit: And that results in a dangerous combination: First waiting too long and then getting the answser "no free appointments". And if you insist the next one is in 3 or 6 months. Many Finns do not insist.
Do Germans share the British tendency to think everything is better in the rest of the world?
As an immigrant (as a child, admittedly) and someone who has lived and worked elsewhere and, more importantly, does not completely share this aspect of the culture, I find British pessimism and self-flagellation really, really annoying.
And yes, you obviously have to pay to get your own data.
Digitalization is really behind yes, and homeownership is even more expensive than the US. But rent is almost half the US and groceries are cheaper. And instead of subsidizing full sized pickup trucks and EVs, you get Audis, VWs, etc for cheaper.
What do you mean? I am not sure what you mean by decent treatments.
> Schufa
There is some change happening there, especially now that the EU Justice Court ruled against credit scoring institutions (they break GDPR, etc.). Very slowly, as usual, but it might happen. (Also the current governement is planning changes.)
The worst part is potential tenants handing over full dossiers about their background to the prospective landlords. Passport copies, payslips, account statements and more. And as a tenant, you have no way of knowing when does it all end up.
At best it will be dumped into a paper recycling bin. But who knows if all these documents aren't sold further.
You also have no choice, you comply or you lose any chance of getting a flat.
The issue in places like NYC (and some German cities like Berlin I gather) is that the extreme tenant protection laws mean that landlords have to go to extreme lengths to protect themselves from tenants. In NYC you could have a tenant not paying, damaging the property, and pushing out neighboring tenants, for well over a year before you can force them out, if they're ornery enough. It could kill your business, and it probably did kill the business of most landlords who didn't switch to extreme draconian documentation requirements in applications: multiple tax returns, multiple statements from all bank accounts, proof of employment, records of previous residences, contact info for previous landlords ...
If the 2nd party requires you to pay for their request to the 3rd party then I'd say there isn't a difference.
Although I mean unless you've established at least a correlation between some piece of information and say ability to pay then you really shouldn't be asking for it ...
Those crazy stories are indeed crazy and simply not true.
We found a workaround and ten years later the house is paid off, just for illustration of how predictive that report was. I'll cheer for whoever takes on and fights Schufa, always.
Interestingly, I didn’t need a credit check to rent in Belgium and Denmark.
That said, I agree with you. It needs to go.
Currently in Germany, yeah... we paid the Schufa tax twice over because we're two people renting together, and the GDPR data export thingy conveniently omits the credit score they've computed about you...
Was considering whether one can make use of the 14-day return thing, but they've thought of that: it uses a sealed envelope that's hard to open without leaving evidence (under a guise of having a nice opener mechanism).
But it sounds like you were dealing with an individual landlord, that's kinda rare. They might be more willing to use common sense and not ask useless documents from someone who just arrived in the country.
On the other hand, big property management companies will typically not bother with an application that doesn't tick all the boxes.
On the other hand, most landlords and property management companies absolutely hate applications from people who they know are going to leave after a fixed term contract.
Further, as of GDPR, you are entitled to all information from the agencies for free. Prior, you could obtain it for a small fee (£2 by post if my memory serves me correctly).
As far as I'm concerned, SCHUFA is basically a scam I am compelled to fall for whenever I want to rent somewhere.
It looks more like the Mafia. You pay a protection tax but this does not guaranty anything.
It took nearly 10 for my previous landlord to face the justice.
She was completely outrageous and shameless in her crimes - blatantly in violation of registration for HMC, violation of planning permissions, squalor, disrepair, the houses had rats and literal hole in the wall for rain and wind. She would harass gullible and naive students, illegally evict them, etc. and all her crimes were on written record.
And she was doing it with impunity for years. For all that, her punishment is a slap on the wrist - https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/news/article/266/rogue_landlor...
I have never known anyone to demand the paid version.
On the one hand, I think Schufa is collecting a lot of unnecessary data that they should'nt have access to. For example, when I bought a pre-paid SIM card in Germany the provider did a Schufa check. No idea why.
On the other hand, I get why a credit score can be useful for larger purchase decisions. If I was a bank, I'd like to know if the person I'm lending 400k for a property, has in the past defaulted on any loans.
I genuinely don't know what a good middle ground is though.
“Has this person defaulted before?”
If someone wants to borrow huge sums from a bank the bank should take the risk and price it appropriately.
If someone wants to borrow money to buy a TV the seller should take the risk and price it appropriately.
The current solution seems too invasive for what it provides. How is the world better because Schufa knows someone bought a prepaid phone card and can sell that to an online store when you buy a pair of shoes and choose to pay by invoice the next week?
Something is in theory cheaper somewhere but where is the proof? The only hard data we have is that Schufa and companies like them are making billions, so there is certainly money to be saved by someone somewhere by scrapping this.
Yes, but the point is that they can use your credit score to make more fine-grained assessment of risk.
Should an auto insurance company offer the same rate to a 97 year old blind driver with a history of accidents as they would to a 30 year old in good health with no tickets? What about the 16 year old who just passed his driving test yesterday? Clearly these three people present vastly different levels of risk to the insurance company and, even though it is certainly possible for the insurance company to do so, it would be stupid to ask them to pay the same rate.
The bank is simply doing the same thing: Pricing risk appropriately. The fact that they offer significantly different interest rates to different groups (or decline to offer credit entirely) just shows that these signals are effective at measuring risk.
> How is the world better because Schufa knows someone bought a prepaid phone card and can sell that to an online store when you buy a pair of shoes and choose to pay by invoice the next week?
Well, the shoe store is extending you credit, so it would seem appropriate for them to want to, as you put it, price the risk appropriately. The fact that you have recently undertaken other credit obligations is suggestive (yes, not conclusive, but still suggestive) that you may be in a precarious place financially and thus statistically more likely not to pay your credit on time.
The amazing thing of living in the modern connected world is that we have all sorts of information available easily. We can use what other countries are doing as inspiration, or as learnings what not to do.
The problem you're describing has been solved for decades in tens of countries around the world, there's no point in reinventing the wheel. In France what the bank does is ask the national bank about the person's credit history, which will only contain current and past loans, lapses in repayments, being sent to collections, etc. So only stuff that is actually relevant to the question "has this person defaulted on loans previously and are they thus a risk of defaulting again", which together with the information about current revenues is all they need.
When I moved to Berlin after having lived in London, my Schufa was thus as pristine as possible - simply because I had no German credit history to begin with.
the main consumer-facing score is what you are describing, which is never used by their customers.
for customers (banks,insurances, retail companies etc.) they have scores tailored to their industry (branchenscore), which also includes repaid loans etc.
the "basisscore" is pretty much useless, it's only a number given out to consumers.
in the following section i talk a little bit about the differences between "branchenscores" and the "basisscore": https://onlinekredit.com/schufa-scoring#der-schufa-basisscor...
1. If you apply for a loan, this affects your credit rating. Yes - not get a loan, or default on a loan, simply by applying for a loan, your SCHUFA can be affected negatively. Especially if you are shopping around for loans, this is infuriating. This happens because your SCHUFA is affected simply by another entity checking your SCHUFA score. This is also really annoying because it can be very hard to get a loan as a recent immigrant to Germany, so you inevitably end up applying for multiple ones.
2. Your SCHUFA score is also affected by where you live, and how many jobs you've had in X years, and how often you move (which is often as a recent-ish immigrant).
3. Services like Klarna affect your SCHUFA - even if you have a perfect payback time.
1. The chance, weighted by amount, of a price hike/salary increase
2. The chance, weighted by amount, of a price decline/salary decrease.
As inflation is generally an upward trend, clearly no. 1 is more likely and thus the best bet.
Also someone may have some assets they could turn into liquid cash if I really needed to but may not have a lot of liquid cash on hand, so there would be little risk in paying something in installments as long as their assets would be enough to cover it in a pinch.
I am not sure it actually applies to the cost of a phone. Chances are, if those matter, you'd be better off with a cheaper phone to begin with. (Substitute phone with other luxury articles).
So how do they make money? Sounds like they would be losing money to inflation by offering that service for free.
Generally the logic on "free" financing by the seller is that without it, they may have not made a sale at all. Sure it cuts into their margins, but offering rebates would have had a similar effect.
Klarna probably still charges the vendor a few bucks for handling the thing.
They probably make their money from the seller who banks on the fact that people would be reassured of being able to afford the high priced item, and thus be making more sells than otherwise.
My bank just scraped virtual cards and I use them for online payments so I wanted to use Klarna as a virtual card. Went through the whole process only for it to fail at the end with Klarna saying that they can’t generate that card, but I should go talk to Schufa or Arvato about it.
So, not all use cases are bad and Schufa should distinguish between them.
Most of the time so, you can easily ignore Schufa in your dqy to day live. They suck to deal with for mortgages, loans and appartment rental so. And they over step their authority and abuse their power all the time, without cobsequences for them so far. Hope that changes soon.
Even though, if you log on to the (free) credit reporting service to see your own data - these 'soft searches' are still recorded, so the industry has basically decided that they shouldn't affect your chances of getting credit.
Would you like the models to ignore these predictors of financial strength? Because, you don’t like it?
Solely relying on statistics will have people falling through the cracks.
A perfect example of when thinking only in averages, and using trendy data-first approach leads to awful and stupid results for groups with too little size to matter statistically. Make your models fair, ffs!
There are “soft pulls” and “hard pulls” that affect this differently. Usually it doesn’t matter much in the long run of things.
If everybody now demands this information for free, why would this business continue to operate? And if they don't, how will landlords get information about who is financially reliable and who isn't?
In the US is works because landlords typically will not accept self-obtained credit reports. They pay the credit agency directly. As a consumer I can get my information for free, easily - but my landlord will still want to pay the agency for their own copy.
Maybe you're talking about the score, but the score isn't data - it's an algorithm. "For example, in the case of the complainant, the free information included only a 'basic score', while the paid information showed six different 'industry scores.'"
And this is basically how it works in the US as well. When you get your free credit report, it will contain a score, but not the same score as is seen by a business requesting the report - because there are many different scores used for different purposes. The business pays for the score that matters to them which is different than what the consumer sees.
None of this feels particularly nefarious to me.
https://slate.com/technology/2012/06/schufa-s-plan-to-use-so...
The product they market, the “credit report”, costs €30 and, according to them, is “forgery-proof” and “up to date” (lolz).
I don't know the main differences to the free "data copy" - probably just a report with this specially invented key figure and a bit nicely prepared.
All in all, SCHUFA has a very unsympathetic image here in Germany, I think rightfully so. Nobody wants to have anything to do with them voluntarily.
They did buy an app last year called Bonify that allows you to see your credit score for free. There was a hilarious scandal last year as a security expert was able to get some high politicians credit score through the app and they shut the app down for a few days so this doesn’t get exploited
I bet literally nobody wants their data collected and traded.
The problem is with marketing, not business model.
In the case of landlords it is possible that they ask the potential tenant to hand in a report as a precondition to even make a contract offer. In that case the potential tenant would have to pay for their own data if it weren't for GDPR. The Schufa uses dark patterns to trick people into buying data they legally are entitled to get for free. If you get around their confusing UI (we recently did...) they send you that infamous 30 Euro report for free without much more ado.
But they also provide what's essentially a vanity service where they give you a more detailed breakdown of the information they have on you. They're also allowed to charge for that.
The issue is that under the GDPR, they're also required to provide all the information they have on you, for free.
Now this obviously conflicts with their nice side business, so they're trying to herd people towards the paid offering.
I don't think making the free GDPR export more prominent would threaten their core service. After all, businesses interested in your creditworthiness don't want to make too many complex decisions themselves, so they'll continue to rely on Schufa's stamp of approval instead of wading through the details of your financial history. (And how do they know you're not hiding something from them?)