German consumer services pricing sucks

Somebody steals your credit card information and makes a purchase. You report it to the issuing bank, and they send you a letter saying that the charge of 99 Euros is below 150 Euros, so you won't get a refund.

None.

You point out you have had the card for four years, without any irregularities.

We cannot help you, sorry.

Or the plain traditional German reply we cannot help you.

This is merely one episode of pricing of consumer services in Germany.  To be fair, several online banks won't refuse to reimburse you, yet even many of them have the clause in the contract you have not read, or not fully understood.

As a safety mechanism. Like Deutsche Telekom, owners of T-Mobile USA, told you in their terms and conditions, which you "accepted" by signing a contract for super fast internet. What did they tell you? Read the terms and conditions, which you will find with some luck on some website. Make sure you pick the correct one out of the long list of English sounding package names.
A couple of years ago, the 7 MB/s fast internet was backed by a service level guarantee of 64Kb/s. For download, upload was a blazing 13Kb/s.

Our latest sweet nothing came from the health insurance carrier. We know, this may sound a bit harsh to people who have never had health insurance, but here goes.

The German government changed the framework for health insurance premiums. Until 2015, if you were employed - like the vast majority of folks here - the premium was split down the middle between employee and employer.
From this year on, the employer part is fixed at the 2014 level, it will not increase. Employees received a government gift: a "special levy" of 0.9% of the employee half was eliminated.  In its place, each insurance carrier gets to set its own "surcharge".
Plus, future premium hikes will be born exclusively by the workers and salarymen.

Before this background, our health insurer wrote to tell us: your 0.9% "special levy" for 2015 is the average levy across the industry.

That's all.

Nowhere did the letter explain how calculating the base premium would change on 1 January 2015. It also failed to say that, in order to arrive at an unchanged premium, they first subtracted 0.9% and then added a new, different and exciting 0.9%.

Instead of going on and on about other service areas, bear in mind one thing when you enter into any sort of services contract in Germany: it's like alcohol in a Utah restaurant.

You can get it, if you ask exactly the right question. No extra pause, not too fast, not two but one question mark at the end.

[Update 2/16/2016]
Health insurance providers across the board increased premiums effective January 2016. As predicted above, wage earners and salaried employees pay all of the increase.