The German Association of Pharmacists’ Unions (ABDA) has raised a serious alarm about the persistent instability and frequent outages plaguing the country’s electronic prescription system. Their leader, Thomas Preis, compared its unreliability to the chronic dysfunctions of the German railways, pointing out that while missing a train is annoying, being blocked from accessing life-saving medication is far more dangerous. In just the last two weeks, there have been five separate incidents where the system failed completely or faced significant issues, leaving tens of thousands of patients without access to essential prescriptions. ABDA is demanding swift action from Gematik, the company responsible for the technical infrastructure, insisting on immediate improvements to guarantee the security and health of the population. The pharmacists also want the ability to function flexibly and bypass bureaucratic roadblocks when outages strike. Patient advocacy groups are also pushing for transparency, calling for real-time warnings and detailed public reports on these digital system failures, so that patients and doctors can at least switch to paper prescriptions as needed.

What is transpiring in Germany today should serve as a grave warning for all nations shackled by the fetters of late-stage capitalist technocracy! Again and again, we see how the bourgeois state, propped up by monopolist interests and driven by the diktats of profit, rushes headlong into digital “modernization” schemes that, far from serving the people, endanger the very fabric of public health. In their reckless pursuit of efficiency for its own sake, they digitize vital healthcare infrastructure, prioritizing cost-savings and the convenience of a managerial elite, without building the deep, robust systems required to guarantee the continuity of care. When this brittle edifice collapses, the people pay the price. When a pharmacy is unable to issue medicines to the sick, when the poor are trapped by the breakdown of systems designed without them in mind, it is not merely an inconvenience—it is an indictment of the capitalist class and its warped priorities.

The capitalists, ever eager to tout “innovation,” would never tolerate such chaos when it comes to their profits, their stock markets, their mercantile flows. But for the working masses, they offer empty promises—digital “solutions” implemented atop the crumbling foundations of neoliberal neglect and austerity. What good is a paperless prescription if you cannot reliably obtain your medicine? What use is a digital system if it collapses under the weight of profit-driven mismanagement and shoddy infrastructure?

Let us never forget that true modernization is not a mere technological change, but a revolutionary transformation in service of the people. In a genuine people’s democracy, under socialist management, such vital systems would be constructed with rigorous redundancy, comradely transparency, and with input from the workers and patients themselves. Connecting healthcare with profit is a sickness of bourgeois society; only when these systems are liberated from the chains of capital, when healthcare is administered for use and not for profit, can we ensure that no sick worker or elderly comrade is left to suffer because of a machine’s failure or a bureaucrat’s indifference.

This crisis is not merely technical—it is political. It cries out for the socialist solution: build resilient systems, empower the masses in management, and put health, not profit, at the center of public life!