In its judgment of 28 January 2026, Berlin-Brandenburg Higher Administrative Court declared invalid a local statute on emergency ambulance charges.
The decision against the district of Teltow-Fläming is a landmark moment in a long-running dispute between the bodies that pay for and those that deliver emergency ambulance services in Brandenburg on how charges are calculated. The judgment impacts the disputed issue of “non-transports” in several German states. If an ambulance called out in an emergency does not end up transporting a patient to hospital, the journey generally cannot be billed.
Call-out charges in Germany, paid by health insurers, are set by dividing the expected costs of emergency ambulance services by the projected total number of call-outs. In judicial review proceedings, the statutory health insurance funds criticised this practice for not including non-transports or unnecessary call-outs in the calculation, as these journeys are then refinanced by liable parties (the health insurers) who did not initiate them.
Berlin-Brandenburg Higher Administrative Court ruled that laws on medical charges provide no grounds on which charges may include cost elements covering services that benefit others and which the liable party did not use.
The following Gleiss Lutz team represented the statutory health insurance funds before Berlin-Brandenburg Higher Administrative Court: Dr. Reimar Buchner (partner, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Berlin) Prof. Michael Uechtritz (of counsel, Public Law, Stuttgart), Elisabeth Rathemacher and Dr. Xiao Chen (both Healthcare and Life Sciences, both Berlin).
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