Sabine Dittmar

Sabine Dittmar (born 15 September 1964 in Schweinfurt) is a German physician and a politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). She has represented Bavaria in the Bundestag since 2013, the year the 18th Bundestag held its constituent sitting on 22 October. Her mandate is a seat on the Bavarian SPD state list, and she stands in the constituency of Bad Kissingen in Lower Franconia.

Dittmar has described Maßbach, in the district of Bad Kissingen, as her home town. After a qualifying Hauptschule certificate she trained as a childcare worker, gained the Mittlere Reife and took the Abitur at the Bayernkolleg in Schweinfurt. She studied physics for three semesters at the University of Würzburg before changing to human medicine, and received her licence to practise in 1993. The Bundestag biography, drawn from her own disclosure, dates the qualifying Hauptschulabschluss in Maßbach to 1979, the childcare qualification to 1982 and the second-chance Abitur in Schweinfurt to 1985.

From 1995 until July 2010 she worked as a general practitioner in a joint practice in Maßbach, which she ran with her husband. From 2008 to 2013 she was a member of the Landtag of Bavaria, where she sat on the committee for the environment and health and was consumer-policy spokesperson of the SPD group. In the Bundestag she was an ordinary member of the Health Committee, and of the extended executive of the SPD parliamentary group, from 2013 to 2021. From 2018 to 2021 she was the group's health-policy spokesperson.

On 8 December 2021, after the appointment of Olaf Scholz's cabinet, Karl Lauterbach succeeded Jens Spahn at the Federal Ministry of Health, and Dittmar was presented as a parliamentary state secretary together with Edgar Franke. She held that office until May 2025. The day before the handover, the Deutsches Ärzteblatt reported that the two SPD deputies were to join the ministry and noted that Dittmar had been her group's health spokesperson since 2018.

At the 2025 Bundestag election in constituency 247, Bad Kissingen, she received 25,127 first votes, or 14.5 percent. Dorothee Bär of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria won the seat with 50.5 percent of the first votes, and Dittmar again entered through the state list. In the 21st Bundestag she is an ordinary member of the Defence Committee and of the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and a deputy member of the Health Committee.

Early life and education

Childhood in Lower Franconia

Sabine Dittmar was born on 15 September 1964 in Schweinfurt, listed by the government of Lower Franconia among that region's independent cities (kreisfreie Städte) in Bavaria. The biography on the website of the German Bundestag, which the parliament states is drawn from the member's own information, records her as Roman Catholic. She is from Maßbach, near Schweinfurt, in the rural district of Bad Kissingen, which the same government office counts among the districts of Lower Franconia. A September 2017 profile in the Ärzte Zeitung described her as coming from a working-class family and referred to Maßbach as her home town.

The curriculum vitae she gave the Bavarian Landtag, kept as it stood when she left that parliament and expressly based on her own statements, says that she attended the Hauptschule in Maßbach from 1970 to 1979 and left with the qualifizierender Hauptschulabschluss, the qualifying form of the lower-secondary certificate. The Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte gives the same dates in its Bavariathek entry. The Bundestag text notes the qualifying certificate, taken in Maßbach in 1979, but not the years of attendance. In interviews she has called herself a Spätzünderkind and said that only in the eighth year of the Hauptschule did she find that learning could be enjoyable.

Second-chance schooling and medical studies

From 1979 to 1982 she attended a vocational school (Berufsfachschule) with an attached Berufsaufbauschule in Münnerstadt, where in 1982 she qualified as a state-certified childcare worker (staatlich geprüfte Kinderpflegerin) and gained the intermediate certificate (mittlere Reife). She then spent 1982 to 1985 at the Bayernkolleg in Schweinfurt and in 1985 passed the Abitur, which the Landtag biography records as the allgemeine Hochschulreife, the general qualification for university. The Bavarian Ministry of Education classifies the Bayernkolleg Schweinfurt as a state Gymnasium of the second educational pathway (zweiter Bildungsweg).

In Bavaria a Kolleg prepares adults for that qualification. The education ministry describes the teaching as full-time, so that pupils may not hold a full-time job during the course, and gives the usual length as three years for those who already have the intermediate certificate, or four years if they first take a preparatory year (Vorkurs). Admission requires a completed vocational qualification or at least two years of employment, and in the qualification phase the syllabus follows the upper secondary curriculum of the Bavarian Gymnasium. The school itself states that a Bayernkolleg has existed in Schweinfurt since 1967. Dittmar's three years there came immediately after the childcare qualification and the mittlere Reife. The Bundestag biography records the 1985 Abitur on the second educational pathway in Schweinfurt, and the 1982 childcare qualification, without naming Münnerstadt or the intermediate certificate.

At the University of Würzburg (Julius-Maximilians-Universität) she studied physics from 1985 to 1987. Deutsches Ärzteblatt, in a 2018 profile by Rebecca Beerheide, reported that she transferred to human medicine after three semesters of physics. The Landtag biography dates the medical course from 1987 to 1993 and states that the Approbation, the state licence to practise as a physician, was granted on 21 April 1993. The Bundestag entry also places the Approbation in 1993, after medical studies at Würzburg, and does not mention the physics course. The Ärzteblatt profile likewise gives 1993 as the year of the licence.

In the 2017 Ärzte Zeitung interview she said that, without state support, BAföG and holiday jobs in shift work and piece-rate work, she would not have been able to finance the second-chance schooling and the university course.

Medical practice

General practice in Maßbach

After studying human medicine at the University of Würzburg, Sabine Dittmar received her Approbation, the full German licence to practise, on 21 April 1993. She then completed further training in general medicine, partly in a practice and partly in hospital, and on 5 October 1995 was recognized in the area designation Praktische Ärztin (practical physician). From 1995 until July 2010 she worked as a general practitioner in a joint practice (Gemeinschaftspraxis) in Maßbach with her husband, the physician Dr. med. Diethard Dittmar.

Maßbach is a market municipality in the Bad Kissingen district of Lower Franconia, in the Main-Rhön region. Its territory covers 59.31 square kilometres, and the census of 9 May 2011 recorded 4,600 inhabitants. Outpatient care in a place of that size rested on office-based general practices. In September 2013, speaking to Deutsches Ärzteblatt about the surgery she and her husband had run until 2010, Dittmar described what that meant in practice: equipment had to be kept on site, continuing education and quality requirements had to be met, and in her part of the region privately insured patients accounted for only a few percent of turnover under health insurance. She said she had put that account to colleagues in committee when early debates on family-doctor contracts (Hausarztverträge) sometimes treated the issue as little more than patients saving the then ten-euro practice fee (Praxisgebühr).

She had been a member of the Landtag of Bavaria for the Social Democratic Party of Germany since 20 October 2008, so the mandate and the Maßbach partnership overlapped until she left the practice. The Bundestag biography, drawn from her own statements, dates the end of the practice to July 2010. Deutsches Ärzteblatt reported in 2013 that she had given up the joint general practice in favour of politics, and that people in Maßbach still asked “die Sabine” for advice when they met her out shopping.

Further qualifications and the pandemic

While the practice was still open, two additional designations (Zusatzbezeichnungen) were recognized: naturopathy (Naturheilverfahren) in 2003 and acupuncture in 2006. Those years are recorded in the biography she supplied to the Landtag. The shorter text published by the Bundestag notes the training as a practical physician and the practice from 1995 to July 2010, but not the two additional designations. An earlier Bundestag biography, as of September 2013, did list the naturopathy designation and named the joint practice with Dr. Diethard Dittmar as having ended in 2010.

During the COVID-19 pandemic she returned to hands-on work as a volunteer, without reopening a surgery. In a December 2020 interview with Die Zeit she said that, after a March appeal for doctors, medical students and retired staff, she and her husband had registered with the district health office. When the Bundestag was not in a plenary week she took shifts at a drive-through testing station on the district works yard (Bauhof). People arrived by car; a container was later put up for the staff because of the cold. In full protective equipment she recorded personal details, took swabs and sent the samples to a laboratory. A shift lasted about two and a half to three hours. She said that on one Thursday she had taken about 170 swabs, and that outbreaks in nurseries and schools had brought in more children than a few weeks earlier. She described the shifts as time away from desk work and as direct contact with health-office staff and with the people being tested. The testing was support for the local public-health service, a decade after the Maßbach practice had closed, not a return to office-based general practice.

Party offices and the Bavarian Landtag

SPD roles in Bad Kissingen

Sabine Dittmar joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 1981. In the Maßbach branch she was secretary (Schriftführerin) and treasurer (Kassiererin) from 1981 to 1990; the biography she gave the Landtag of Bavaria describes those two offices as held alternately. She chaired the branch from 1990 to 2007. On the executive of the SPD district association for Bad Kissingen she was an assessor from 1981 to 1997, deputy chair from 1997 to 2008, chair from 2008 to 2018 and an assessor again from 2018. The Landtag text dates the chairmanship from May 2008. From 1997 to 2007 she was deputy chair of the SPD sub-district Rhön-Haßberge, and she has been an assessor there since 2007.

The Landtag biography also dates her membership of the SPD executive for Lower Franconia from July 2008. Her later Bundestag account states that she was a member of that executive from 2008 to 2012, an assessor from 2012 and deputy chair from 2016. From 2011 to 2019 she was an assessor on the SPD state executive in Bavaria, and from 2016 to 2019 a member of the presidium of the BayernSPD. These party offices are recorded as her own statements.

She has sat on the district council (Kreistag) of Landkreis Bad Kissingen since October 1990. She was deputy chair of the SPD group from 1996 to 2005 and its chair from 2005 to 2008. The biography current at her departure from the Landtag in 2013 records her again as deputy group chair from 1 January 2009. From May 2008 to April 2020 she was a member of the municipal council of the market town of Maßbach.

Landtag term, 2008–2013

At the election of 28 September 2008 she was the SPD candidate in Stimmkreis 603, Bad Kissingen. The constituency comprised the district of Bad Kissingen and, from the district of Rhön-Grabfeld, Bischofsheim an der Rhön, Oberelsbach, Sandberg and the administrative communities of Fladungen and Ostheim vor der Rhön. The direct mandate went to Robert Kiesel of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, an agricultural master who had represented the constituency since 16 May 1990 and remained a Landtag member until 7 October 2013. Kiesel received 29,011 first votes (49.1 percent); Dittmar received 10,234 (17.3 percent). By the CSU share of first votes, Bad Kissingen ranked tenth among Bavaria's constituencies.

Statewide the CSU took 43.4 percent of valid votes (Gesamtstimmen) and 92 of 187 seats, the first time since the Landtag election of 1958 that it was short of an absolute majority of seats. Only the CSU, with 90 constituency seats, and the SPD, with one, won direct mandates; overhang and compensatory seats brought the chamber to 187 members, 39 of them SPD. In Lower Franconia the CSU's share of valid votes was 47.3 percent, the highest of the seven Regierungsbezirke, and the SPD's was 16.7 percent. Turnout there was 57.9 percent, the same as in Bavaria as a whole.

Dittmar was third on the SPD list for the Lower Franconia electoral region, number 203 on the ballot, after Karin Pranghofer and Harald Schneider and before Volkmar Halbleib. Under the open-list system a candidate's order follows the sum of first and second votes rather than the nominated place. She received 16,797 votes in all, 6,563 of them second votes, and placed fourth among the SPD candidates in the region. The state statistical office recorded her, like Pranghofer, Schneider and Halbleib, as elected from the regional list rather than in a constituency. She belonged to the SPD group in the Landtag from 20 October 2008 to 7 October 2013, returned for Lower Franconia.

From 4 December 2008 until the end of the term she was a member of the Committee on the Environment and Health, and she was the SPD group's spokesperson on consumer policy. From 29 June 2011 she sat on the Council of Elders (Ältestenrat). From 13 July 2011 she was a deputy member of the parliamentary commission accompanying the energy transition (Energiewende) in Bavaria. The Landtag lists her on the Bavarian State Health Council from 16 December 2008 to 7 October 2013; her Bundestag biography extends that membership to 2018. She was a substitute member of the Federal Convention on 23 May 2009 and a member on 30 June 2010.

The consumer-policy role is on the plenary record for 29 February 2012. Dittmar opened debate on an SPD urgent motion, "Lessons from Müller-Brot — reorganisation of food inspection" (Drucksache 16/11631), which she had signed with Markus Rinderspacher, Inge Aures and other members of the group. Heard with a Green motion on publishing food-inspection results, it asked the state government to reorganise food controls and to change public information after hygiene failures at the bakery firm Müller-Brot. A recorded vote rejected the SPD motion by 98 votes to 48, with no abstentions.

Elections to the Bundestag

List seats and the Bad Kissingen constituency

Sabine Dittmar has been a member of the Bundestag in the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st electoral terms, returned at the elections of 22 September 2013, 24 September 2017, 26 September 2021 and 23 February 2025. Each time she was the Social Democratic Party (SPD) candidate in the Bad Kissingen constituency and entered on the closed Bavarian SPD state list (Landesliste), not by winning the seat. Official results name Dorothee Bär of the Christian Social Union (CSU) as the elected constituency member in all four contests, with Dittmar the runner-up.

The constituency comprises the districts of Bad Kissingen, Haßberge and Rhön-Grabfeld in Lower Franconia. It was numbered 248 in 2013, 2017 and 2021 and 247 in 2025; the three districts were unchanged. The Bundestag lists two constituency offices for her: Spargasse 10, 97688 Bad Kissingen, and Marktplatz 6, 97437 Haßfurt.

Bundestag elections are a personalized proportional system. Each voter has a first vote for a constituency candidate and a second vote for a party's state list in the Land. Through 2021, the candidate with the most first votes took the constituency seat. Second votes fixed each party's seats, using the Sainte-Laguë method; constituency winners were deducted from that entitlement and the remaining seats were filled in the order of the closed list. Overhang and compensatory seats could enlarge the Bundestag beyond its then statutory size of 598. On the SPD list in Bavaria, Dittmar was placed 12th in 2013, 10th in 2017 and 14th in 2021, and was elected from the list in each of those years.

A law of 8 June 2023, in force for the 2025 election, caps the Bundestag at 630 members and abolishes overhang and compensatory seats. A party candidate who leads on first votes now receives the constituency seat only if that seat is covered by the party's second-vote entitlement in the Land (Zweitstimmendeckung); uncovered constituency wins leave the seat vacant, and seats that remain are assigned down the state list. The Federal Constitutional Court held on 30 July 2024 that the coverage rule is compatible with the Basic Law. Dittmar again finished second in Bad Kissingen, so the rule did not decide a constituency seat for her. She stood in sixth place on the Bavarian SPD list. The SPD won 11.5 percent of Bavarian second votes (920,675), and the state's list of those elected records 14 SPD members, all via the Landesliste and including Dittmar.

Results from 2013 to 2025

On 22 September 2013, turnout in constituency 248 was 71.3 percent (155,355 of 217,994 eligible voters). Dittmar received 30,564 first votes (19.9 percent) and Bär 88,911 (57.9 percent). The SPD second-vote share in the constituency was 18.2 percent (27,931), against 53.9 percent (82,760) for the CSU.

On 24 September 2017, turnout was 79.2 percent (171,202 of 216,030). Dittmar received 32,383 first votes (19.1 percent) and Bär 86,603 (51.1 percent). Second votes went 15.8 percent to the SPD (26,904), 44.6 percent to the CSU (75,788) and 11.6 percent to the Alternative for Germany (19,650).

On 26 September 2021, turnout was 81.4 percent (174,164 of 214,061). Dittmar received 32,844 first votes (19.0 percent) and Bär 67,458 (39.1 percent). Second votes were 17.6 percent for the SPD (30,540) and 37.6 percent for the CSU (65,063). Other first-vote shares included the AfD at 9.9 percent (17,130), Alliance 90/The Greens at 9.5 percent (16,467) and the Free Voters at 8.2 percent (14,102).

On 23 February 2025, in constituency 247, turnout was 85.8 percent (180,527 of 210,364 eligible voters). Bär won with 87,357 first votes (50.5 percent); Dittmar was second with 25,127 (14.5 percent). Next were the Free Voters with 22,323 (12.9 percent), the Greens with 10,615 (6.1 percent), Die Linke with 9,957 (5.8 percent) and the Free Democratic Party with 8,444 (4.9 percent). No AfD first votes were recorded. On second votes the CSU led with 41.8 percent (75,101), the AfD followed with 23.0 percent (41,432), and the SPD took 9.7 percent (17,374).

Health policy in the Bundestag, 2013–2021

Committee membership and the spokesperson role

From 2013 to 2021 Sabine Dittmar was an ordinary member of the Bundestag Committee on Health and sat on the extended executive of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) parliamentary group. In the 18th Bundestag she was deputy health-policy spokesperson. On 30 January 2018 the group elected her spokesperson and chair of its health working group, after Hilde Mattheis did not stand again. Edgar Franke, until then chair of the Health Committee, also stood; the group chose her by 89 votes to 51. She kept the brief through the 19th Bundestag. In December 2021 she and Franke became parliamentary state secretaries at the Federal Ministry of Health under Karl Lauterbach. The Pharmazeutische Zeitung reported the spokesperson’s post still open; Deutsches Ärzteblatt later named Heike Baehrens, the group’s former care-policy spokesperson, as her successor.

The COVID-19 years fell inside that term. On 18 December 2020, after a hard lockdown had begun, she told Vorwärts that the shutdown had been medically overdue, that Christmas easings of contact rules were humanly understandable but medically counterproductive, and that the first vaccine authorisation was expected before Christmas. The Ärzte Zeitung later wrote that she had also worked substantially on the redrafting of the Infection Protection Act.

Insurance, nursing and medicines policy

Before the 2017 election she named a return to parity in statutory health insurance, and a Bürgerversicherung, as particular aims. On 29 September 2016 she told the Bundestag that the employee-only surcharge had been a painful decision, taken in a weak labour market to avoid benefit cuts, and that with fuller funds the shares should again be equal, “best embedded in a solidaristic citizens’ insurance.” CDU health politician Lothar Riebsamen answered that undoing those measures risked reversing the labour-market stabilisation of the mid-2000s. Harald Weinberg of Die Linke called it contradictory that the SPD demanded parity while voting down motions to restore it at once. Doctors’ objections, focused on fees for privately insured patients, were already a campaign theme in 2013: she told Deutsches Ärzteblatt that in her region such patients were only a few percent of practice turnover, that the concept drew “an incredible amount of polemic,” and that total physicians’ fees were not meant to fall.

The 2018 coalition bargain stopped short of that reform. Welt reported that Union and SPD negotiators dropped the citizens’ insurance—the SPD had treated it as a condition of another grand coalition, and the CDU had resisted—and agreed instead to restore equal contributions. In April 2018 Dittmar said a lead bill should pass before the summer recess so that, from 1 January 2019, employers paid half of each fund’s Zusatzbeitrag. Health minister Jens Spahn (CDU) was meanwhile pressing funds with large reserves to lower contributions. The Bundestag passed the GKV Insured Persons’ Relief Act on 18 October 2018. From 1 January 2019 the Zusatzbeitrag was split equally between employees and employers, or pensioners and the pension insurance; the general rate stayed at 14.6 percent.

On hospital nursing she moved from defending statutory floors to calling them incomplete. When the Bundestag in 2017 attached minimum staffing ratios for nursing-sensitive wards to an infection-surveillance law, she said an auditor would have to confirm compliance so hospitals could not shift staff on paper. Elisabeth Scharfenberg of Alliance 90/The Greens called the floors only a minimum, to be set by funds and hospitals with financial interests of their own. In April 2018 Dittmar said floors did not satisfy her, that proper staffing benchmarks would take at least three years, and that hospital nursing should be reimbursed at cost outside the diagnosis-related groups. She accused hospitals of using about three billion euros a year, provided inside those groups for nursing, on other spending, including investment.

On 8 November 2019 she called social long-term care insurance, then 25 years old, a social achievement, but said co-payments—especially for long nursing-home stays—had to be limited. Citing the SPD paper “Pflege solidarisch gestalten,” she argued for a “genuine care citizens’ insurance” in which the person’s own share, not the insurance benefit, would be capped. She also pressed the Länder on investment costs and proposed paid care leave for family carers, modelled on parental allowance.

Outpatient supply was tied to her district. The Ärzte Zeitung described Bad Kissingen—the districts of Bad Kissingen, Haßberge and Rhön-Grabfeld—as Bavaria’s largest Bundestag constituency by area. In 2013 she used a country practice in Maßbach to argue that general practice was taught too late, noting that at Würzburg students met it only in the ninth semester, and that medical-school admission should weigh an intention to work in patient care more heavily. On the 2019 Appointment Service and Care Act she said the SPD had secured an optional tariff for GP-centred care, making general practice more attractive and rewarding patients who enrolled.

On medicines, the Pharmazeutische Zeitung noted that she had covered pharmacy questions in the working group, had wanted pharmacists more involved in the medication plan, and could imagine paying them more for advice than for dispensing. Pharmacists criticised the SPD’s refusal of a ban on mail-order prescription drugs; she said a ban would, among other effects, put supply of special formulations at risk.

Organ donation was a conscience question. She was among the members who, with sponsors including Lauterbach and Spahn, introduced the 25 June 2019 bill for a double opt-out rule. On 16 January 2020 the Bundestag rejected it by 292 votes to 379, with three abstentions; she voted in favour. A written explanation cited about 10,000 seriously ill people on the waiting list and said campaigns and better hospital structures had not raised donor numbers, while the competing decision-solution bill left the status quo. She voted against that bill in the final vote, which passed by 432 to 200, with 37 abstentions.

Parliamentary State Secretary for Health

Appointment under Karl Lauterbach

On 8 December 2021, after the new federal government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz had been appointed, Jens Spahn handed the office of federal minister of health to Karl Lauterbach at the Federal Ministry of Health. At the same ceremony Lauterbach presented Bundestag members Sabine Dittmar, as parliamentary state secretary, and Edgar Franke, as parliamentary state secretary, both of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and gave each an instrument of appointment. The civil-service state secretary Thomas Steffen stayed on for the time being, joined by Antje Draheim as a further state secretary. Deutsches Ärzteblatt had reported the two parliamentary appointments the previous day, noting that Dittmar had been the SPD parliamentary group’s health-policy spokesperson and that Franke had chaired the Bundestag health committee from 2014 to 2018.

Under the Act on the Legal Status of Parliamentary State Secretaries, the holders must be members of the Bundestag, apart from a narrow exception for a secretary to the chancellor. The federal president appoints them on the chancellor’s proposal, agreed with the minister they will support. They assist that minister in governmental business. The office, a public-law relationship with the federation, ends when the minister’s tenure ends, including any caretaker continuation under Article 69 of the Basic Law. Ärzteblatt described the work as supporting the minister and representing the ministry in public, in the plenary, in committees and towards the parliamentary group.

The Bundestag biography records Dittmar’s tenure as December 2021 to May 2025. The Scholz government left office after the 2025 election. On 6 May 2025 Bundestag president Julia Klöckner administered the oath to the ministers of the cabinet of Friedrich Merz, including Nina Warken of the Christian Democratic Union as federal minister of health in succession to Lauterbach.

Hospital reform, care and the pandemic aftermath

The main hospital bill of Lauterbach’s term was the Hospital Care Improvement Act (Krankenhausversorgungsverbesserungsgesetz, KHVVG). The Bundestag passed it on 17 October 2024 by 373 votes to 285, with one abstention. Deutsches Ärzteblatt reported 65 service groups (Leistungsgruppen), with uniform rules for staff and equipment, and a retention payment (Vorhaltevergütung) intended to make up 60 percent of what had been paid through diagnosis-related groups. Coalition speakers said care would improve; the opposition warned of further closures.

The Bundesrat approved the KHVVG on 22 November 2024. The ministry said hospitals would receive the retention payment for the service groups assigned by the states’ planning authorities, and only if nationwide quality criteria were met. The payment was described as securing a relevant share of the cost of keeping necessary hospitals available, largely independently of how many cases they treated. States were given until the end of 2026 to assign service groups, with the financing system to be shifted in stages in 2027 and 2028 and the change completed in 2029.

Dittmar put the same division of labour to hospitals in Bavaria. In September 2023 she visited Klinikum Landkreis Erding, with sites in Erding and Dorfen, and met district administrator Martin Bayerstorfer, members of the district hospital committee and staff. The district’s account says those present warned that concentrating treatment on conurbations could worsen a search for free beds that the integrated dispatch centre for Erding, Freising and Ebersberg already found difficult. They also said minimum volumes, seven-day cover of a cardiac-catheter laboratory, and the range of specialties required for stroke care could force rural services to stop, and that wage increases were not being reimbursed. The Münchner Merkur reported that Dittmar afterwards called the meeting a “good dialogue”, said the federation would close no hospital, and said hospital planning was and would remain a matter for the states. She placed the blame for thin rural provision on the Bavarian government’s planning rather than on Berlin, and she treated higher case numbers as a route to better results. CSU Bundestag member Andreas Lenz said a necessary reform must not drain hospitals outside the cities.

Hospital associations and the Bavarian government rejected that reading of the bill. On 8 November 2024 Gerald Gaß, chairman of the German Hospital Federation, said an extra 500 million euros — a figure he attributed to the ministry — would not save a single hospital from insolvency against an annual deficit he put at 6 billion euros. At the German Hospital Congress on 11 November he said he would rather have no reform than the draft KHVVG, and he urged the states to call the mediation committee on 22 November; they could set service groups themselves, as North Rhine-Westphalia had done. In May 2024 Judith Gerlach, Bavarian health minister and a member of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), called the cabinet draft a missed chance, warned of worse rural care and of closures for financial reasons, and said the bill intruded on the states’ planning power. Bavaria reserved a complaint to the Federal Constitutional Court.

Dittmar also spoke for the ministry on the pandemic’s later phase and on pharmacies. In a Main-Post interview published on 4 January 2022, as federal and state leaders discussed the Omicron wave, she argued that any shorter quarantine should apply to everyone. On 21 March 2023, at a symposium of the Federal Chamber of Pharmacists, she said influenza and COVID-19 vaccinations in pharmacies had proved their worth — 330,000 between February 2022 and March 2023 — and would become a larger part of regular care. An extension to other adult vaccines was conceivable but not then planned; she did not see multiple childhood vaccinations being given in pharmacies.

On 23 February 2024 the Bundestag adopted the government’s Cannabis Act by 404 votes to 226, with four abstentions. The CDU/CSU group cast no votes in favour. Before the final reading, German Medical Association president Klaus Reinhardt said recreational legalisation should be rejected on medical grounds: it would play down a drug linked to lasting developmental harm, especially before about the age of 25, and the association wanted prevention rather than legalisation. It had asked every member of the Bundestag to vote no. After the vote Dittmar welcomed the Act. She said it put health protection, including that of minors, at the centre, that supply to children and adolescents would be punished more severely, and that consumers would no longer depend on a black market in substances of unknown content.

Public disputes

In December 2022 an interview Dittmar gave the Main-Post on nursing — the cost of care homes, temporary-agency labour and the shortage of nurses — was stopped inside the ministry. On 19 December the paper reported that she had to withdraw the interview and asked whether Lauterbach had imposed a muzzle. The next day it carried criticism from Klaus Holetschek, then Bavaria’s health minister, under a headline quoting him that “talk-show star Lauterbach” wanted the spotlight to himself. The interview appeared on 29 December 2022, after the ministry had held it back.

A separate argument followed the announced closure of St. Josef hospital in Schweinfurt. On 3 August 2024 the Main-Post reported that the local CSU blamed the federal government and the SPD, and accused Dittmar of keeping out of sight. The same day the paper reported her reply: she said she did not publish a social-media post about every visit, and she pointed to falling revenue at St. Josef.

The 21st Bundestag

Defence, family and health committees

The Bundestag elected on 23 February 2025 constituted itself on 25 March 2025. Sabine Dittmar of the SPD stood again in Bad Kissingen (constituency 247) in Bavaria and entered on the state list, not by a direct seat. Dorothee Bär of the CSU led the constituency: the CSU took 87,357 first votes (50.5 percent) and the SPD 25,127 (14.5 percent). SPD second votes there were 17,374 (9.7 percent), on a turnout of 85.8 percent. Dittmar held place 6 on the Bavarian SPD list.

The Bundestag lists her in this term as an ordinary member of the Defence Committee and of the Committee on Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and only as a deputy on the Health Committee. She had been only a deputy on defence in 2013–2017 and 2017–2021, beside full membership of the Health Committee. In 2021–2025, as Parliamentary State Secretary for Health from December 2021 to May 2025, her recorded seat was the main committee.

On 15 April 2026, in the family committee’s discussion of the federal reports on older people, she asked about income in old age, the federal loneliness strategy, and multi-generational houses as places of contact in her constituency. In April 2026 she and the mayor of Bad Brückenau visited the Army combat-simulation centre in Wildflecken, which trains brigade and division staffs and, since 2023, Ukrainian staffs—about 4,000 soldiers, by the local report. She called that a contribution to European security.

On 18 September 2025 the House elected her, with Claudia Moll, to the board of trustees of the Deutsche Härtefallstiftung, on a joint proposal of the CDU/CSU, the AfD and the SPD; Alliance 90/The Greens and Die Linke abstained. The Bonn foundation helps people in exceptional hardship that may have arisen from service in the Bundeswehr or the former National People’s Army, including families. Her biography also lists the parliamentary circle on biosphere reserves, reconstituted this term under Michael Donth (CDU) to keep Germany’s UNESCO biosphere reserves on the parliamentary agenda.

Organ donation and other initiatives

Outside that deputy seat she pressed again for a Widerspruchsregelung, or opt-out, in place of extended consent for organ donation. In January 2020 the Bundestag had rejected opt-out and kept a rule requiring a lifetime decision or, failing that, a judgement by relatives. A bill she headed, Drucksache 20/13804 of 14 November 2024, had its first reading on 5 December 2024. She argued for a change of model; sceptics called removal without consent disproportionate, and Karl-Josef Laumann, for the Bundesrat, asked for a vote still in that term. It did not reach a final vote before the early election.

On 25 June 2026 the House debated the question without a whip. Dittmar said clinic and register reforms had not been enough, and that Germany used organs from neighbours with opt-out rules without matching their conditions. Gitta Connemann (CDU) said a refusal could be registered at any time; the Green Kirsten Kappert-Gonther replied that silence is not consent.

The bill of the new term, Drucksache 21/7570 of 13 August 2026, was introduced by Dittmar, Connemann, Armin Grau of Alliance 90/The Greens and Peter Aumer, with 254 members from the CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens and the Left. It cited 985 post-mortem donors in 2025, against 8,199 people on the waiting list, and a 2024 survey in which about 85 percent were rather favourable to donation while 45 percent had recorded a decision. Consenting adults and adults who had not expressly objected could both be donors. Relatives would be asked about a known wish but would not decide, except for a minor with no statement, and removal would be barred where the person had been unable to consent for at least a year and had left no declaration. A public campaign would precede entry into force on 1 January 2030.

At the first reading on 24 September 2026 she said the plan created no duty to donate, only a different starting point, with objection still possible at any time. Martin Sichert (AfD) called opt-out incompatible with dignity and bodily integrity and questioned brain-death diagnosis; Sven Lehmann (Greens) said consent had to be active and credited Spanish donation rates to hospital organisation, not the legal default. The Bundesrat’s own bill, 21/2738, sought the same change. Motion 21/8050, from 58 members of the CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens and the Left, called opt-out a disputed intrusion on self-determination and proposed asking adults after their 18th birthday to record consent, refusal or indecision, without penalty for silence. The government left the choice to members as a matter of conscience, and all three texts went to the Health Committee.

Personal life

Family and residence

The biography carried by the German Bundestag, which the parliament states rests on the member's own disclosure, records that Sabine Dittmar was born on 15 September 1964 in Schweinfurt, is Roman Catholic, and is married. Profiles in the medical and regional press name her husband as the physician Diethard Dittmar. Ärzte Zeitung reported that from 1995 she worked with him in a general-practice partnership in Maßbach, which the paper called her home town, and Main-Post likewise wrote that the couple had kept a general practice there from that year. Deutsches Ärzteblatt described the joint practice with her husband in the same terms, and the Bundestag biography dates her work there as a general practitioner until July 2010.

Published profiles place her residence in Maßbach, in the district of Bad Kissingen in Lower Franconia, Bavaria. The entry on members of the Bavarian parliament published by the Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte lists Maßbach as her place of residence. Main-Post referred to her in December 2021 as a 57-year-old from Maßbach in that district, and a January 2025 caption in the same paper again identified her as Sabine Dittmar from Maßbach.

Memberships

The Bundestag lists four organisations among her memberships: the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO), Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie e.V., the Bayerisches Rotes Kreuz, and the Europa-Union. The AWO, founded on 13 December 1919 at the initiative of Marie Juchacz, is a welfare association; the Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Freien Wohlfahrtspflege counts it as one of the six central associations of independent social welfare in Germany. Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie was founded in Bonn on 19 April 1993 by public figures from several parties after racist attacks in the early 1990s, with Hans-Jochen Vogel as founding chair; the association joins historical-political education on dictatorship and resistance to civic work for democracy.

Under Article 1 of the Bavarian law of 16 July 1986 on its legal status, the Bayerisches Rotes Kreuz is a member association of the German Red Cross and a corporation under public law with its seat in Munich. The Europa-Union Deutschland e.V. dates its foundation to a meeting on 9 December 1946 in the Schützenhaus in Syke, Lower Saxony, and keeps its federal office in Berlin. From 2017 to 2022 Dittmar was deputy federal chair of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Sozialdemokratinnen und Sozialdemokraten im Gesundheitswesen (ASG), an honorary party office recorded separately in the Bundestag biography. The ASG describes itself as one of eleven recognised working groups of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, open to members who work in health care and also to non-members, and concerned with health policy inside the party and in public. A slate dated 26 January 2017, proposed by ASG Bayern and the ASG federal board, nominated her for a deputy chair ahead of the federal conference that March, which the SPD reported had elected a new board under Boris Velter.