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| Europe | ||||||||
| Greek health system crumbles under weight of crisis | ||||||||
| 2012-06-15 | ||||||||
| This is what happens when you don't take action to save what you can of your entitlements. But that could never happen here. We're special somehow. Everything will magically continue forward even when we get to the point that we cannot pay our debts. Forward to the insolvency then the Revolution! It's worked so well for everyone else. Greece's rundown state hospitals are cutting off vital drugs,
With Greece now in its fifth year of deep recession, trapped under Europe's biggest public debt burden and dependent on international help to keep paying its bills, the effects are starting to bite deeply into vital services. "It's a matter of life and death for us," said Persefoni Mitta, head of the Cancer Patients' Association, recounting the dozens of calls she gets a day from Greeks needing pricey, hard-to-find cancer drugs. "Why are they depriving us of life?"
The emergency has grown out of a tangle of unpaid bills, with pharmacists and doctors complaining of being unable to pay suppliers until competing health insurers clear a growing backlog of unfilled state payments.
Long queues have been forming outside a handful of pharmacies that still provide medication on credit - the rest are demanding cash upfront until the government pays up a subsidy backlog of 762 million euros, or nearly $1 billion. "We're not talking about painkillers here - we've learned to live with physical pain - we need drugs to keep us alive," Mitta, a petite former marathon runner and herself a cancer survivor, said in a voice shaky with emotion. Greeks have long had to give medical staff cash "gifts" to ensure good treatment. Nevertheless the health system was considered "relatively efficient" before the crisis despite a variety of problems including a fragmented organization and excess bureaucracy, according to a 2009 report for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. But it has been unable to respond to the growing crisis. The European Union and International Monetary Fund, which provided a 130 billion euro lifeline to Greece in March, have demanded big cuts to the system as part of a wider package of austerity measures. But powerful medical lobbies and unions have resisted fiercely. Caretaker Prime Minister Panagiotis Pikrammenos, in office until a new government is formed after the elections, has pleaded for a solution but been powerless to force a change. "It is imperative that this matter is resolved immediately in order to prevent putting people's lives at risk," Pikrammenos said last week. BED SHEETS Outside one of the 133 state hospitals - whose managers have sometimes been appointed as supporters of whichever political party was in power at the time - a banner put up by protesting staff reads "Hospitals Belong to the People". Inside, its gloomy labyrinth of corridors tell a different story. A doctor at the university hospital in the northwestern Athens suburb of Chaidari cites a lack of basic examining room supplies in her own department, such as cotton wool, catheters, gloves and paper used to cover the examining table. The shortage of paper, which is thrown out after each patient has used it, means corners have to be cut on hygiene. "Sometimes we take a bed sheet instead and use it for several patients," said Kiki Kiale, a radiologist specializing in cancer screening. "It's tragic but there's no other solution." Kiale, 52, said staff cutbacks and a lack of crucial equipment - including a digital mammography machine - meant some doctors were seeing 40 patients during a shift but many patients were still unable to get treatment. In the chaos, patients can slip through the cracks or turn up for treatment again only when their illness has progressed too far for them to be saved. "Some incidents are lost completely, others manage to return after a year but it's too late," said Kiale, who spent five years working in Britain's National Health Service (NHS), adding that the lack of stable government made the problem worse.
Elections last month produced a stalemate, with no party achieving a parliamentary majority or able to form a coalition. Greeks vote again on Sunday to try to break the deadlock, with pro-bailout conservatives neck-and-neck with a radical leftist party SYRIZA which rejects the EU and IMF's austerity demands. This has raised the possibility that the lenders will cut off the financial lifeline and Greece will have to leave the euro zone if SYRIZA wins and manages to form a coalition. Pharmaceutical industry sources say drugmakers have already discussed with European authorities how to keep Greece supplied with medicines should it have only new, radically devalued drachmas to pay for them. They have been looking closely at the experience of Argentina's collapse in 2002, when some firms agreed to continue to supply medicines without payment for a while. Greece's wider crisis, which has deprived it of a stable administration for months and absorbed official attention, has made it impossible to push through deep health reform and forced the government to resort to sticking-plaster measures. The Health Ministry says the reports of shortages have been exaggerated and has promised to pay health suppliers 600 million euros from its own budget and that of finance ministry. However, this covers only existing arrears to March, leaving the period to June uncovered. The IMF has said Greece needs to keep public health spending below 6 percent of GDP, down from around 10 percent at present and must sharply cut spending on pharmaceuticals which has surged over the past decade.
"LITTLE ENVELOPES" What effect such cuts will have on patient care is likely to be dramatic, especially without a wider reform of healthcare. Even before the crisis, public hospitals were under strain and the notorious cash-filled "fakelaki" or "little envelope" which patients have had to hand over to get good treatment have become a byword for the corruption in the system.
"The health system has shut its door in their face," said Katerina Avloniti, a 27-year-old psychologist at a free medical clinic in Athens whose patients are no longer eligible to get a blood test, a cardiogram or a simple check up.
"Most are on the verge of depression, others are thinking of suicide. Many are ashamed because until recently, they had a job," she said, adding that many of the patients are 25 to 30-year-olds who have not been able to find work.
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| Posted by:gorb |
| #7 "Sometimes we take a bed sheet instead and use it for several patients," said Kiki Kiale, a radiologist specializing in cancer screening. "It's tragic but there's no other solution." Tragic? A sheet instead of paper? Try getting a little perspective, doc. People dying is tragic. People sharing a sheet for an exam table is inconvenient. Idiot. |
| Posted by: Barbara 2012-06-15 22:15 |
| #6 Sorry, I was just using the IMG icon that goes with the comment window. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2012-06-15 20:40 |
#5
| |
| Posted by: lotp 2012-06-15 14:19 |
| #4 Anguper, I think you're gonna get the mods after you for that picture being too big. I suppose the message is that those kids were poor. Maybe the message is that's the way we're gonna be again. But at least those kids were U.S. citizens at a time when that really meant something. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2012-06-15 13:25 |
| #3 Michigan fruit pickers' kids, 1935: |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2012-06-15 12:44 |
| #2 Missing from this analysis is how the late USSR coped with its own collapse. Most of its people seem to have survived. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2012-06-15 12:27 |
| #1 This is what the world of ObamaCare will look like. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2012-06-15 08:53 |