What is an obesity cure and what are its goals?
“Cure” is basically an outdated term for medical measures that serve to prevent or rehabilitate (“rehab”) after illness. Accordingly, the official names for the cure are preventive service and rehabilitation, and the term curative procedure is also in common use.
Preventive services are health care services that are intended to prevent the development of a disease. Rehabilitation services, on the other hand, serve to mitigate the negative consequences of an already existing illness and to avert consequential damage. All important information about the legal framework of “cures” can be found in the Social Code V and VI. These legal texts specify exactly what the aims of a cure are and what conditions must be fulfilled before it can be claimed.
Practical exercises such as cooking together and sports are therefore part of the basic concept at many obesity clinics. The focus of the obesity cure is not that the participants lose weight in the short term with a diet. Rather, the focus is on uncovering wrong lifestyle and eating habits together and replacing them with newly learned behaviors. The offers and the concrete course of an obesity cure differ depending on the obesity clinic.
An obesity cure is mainly undertaken by people who are already very overweight, who are correspondingly obese and for whom previous conservative therapies have been unsuccessful. An obesity cure is usually a rehabilitation measure. Not all obesity cases already have secondary diseases. Therefore, in addition to weight reduction, the therapy goals also include:
- Preventing serious secondary diseases and reducing the risk of them occurring
- Minimize the risk of death
- @ Improve general health and quality of life
Who pays for the bariatric cure?
Outpatient or inpatient?
A spa treatment is generally considered when the usual outpatient medical measures for the prevention or treatment of an illness are not sufficient. Many preventive and rehabilitation measures are offered both on an outpatient and inpatient basis. In the outpatient setting, the measures usually take place close to home. The costs for overnight stays and meals are then not covered. In the case of an inpatient obesity cure, the participants are in the corresponding obesity cure clinic for a certain period of time (usually three weeks).
In recent years, the funding agencies for cures (pension insurance, health insurance companies) have tended to promote primarily outpatient preventive and rehabilitation measures. Inpatient measures, on the other hand, are increasingly being rejected. Outpatient measures are usually much more favorable for the payers. Especially for the treatment of obesity, however, an inpatient cure is usually much more effective than an outpatient cure.
Mother or father-child cure for obesity
Applying for an obesity cure
An obesity cure must be applied for at the cost unit before it is approved if the necessary requirements are met. First of all, you should find out whether your own health insurance fund or the pension insurance fund is the right recipient for this application. The cost unit will then send you the application documents. These must be completed together with a physician who is authorized to submit an application. Eligible means that the doctor must meet certain requirements in order to be allowed to submit applications (for example, for an obesity cure). As a rule, the right contact person for a spa application is the family doctor.
If approved, you have four months to start the cure. If you do not do so, the entitlement expires. In most cases, the payer specifies the facility (obesity clinic, obesity cure clinic) where the treatment is to take place. With some health insurance companies, you will receive a selection of possible contract partners from which you may choose. In some cases, it is possible to specify a desired location. In most cases, applicants receive mail from the spa clinic shortly after the approval notice with information on the further procedure.
What requirements must be met for a spa treatment?
Depending on the payer, exclusion criteria may have to be taken into account. For example, pensioners or civil servants do not get rehab paid by the German pension insurance.
In the event of a rejection of the obesity rehab application, you have the option of submitting an objection in writing. It is important that you adhere to the time limit (usually 28 days from receipt of the decision). In many cases, applications for a bariatric cure that are initially rejected are successful at the second attempt.
If the objection is also rejected, it is sometimes necessary to go to the social court to enforce the claim for a cure. In some cases, it can take several years before a final decision is reached. Applicants should therefore deal intensively with the topic before the first application and inform themselves in detail about the process of applying for an obesity cure.
