N / s ‘Doctor for all’: Opposition parties are critical at the beginning

Contrary to the position of the rapporteur of ND Anna Efthymiou who argued that the bill of the Ministry of Health puts “at the center of the bill the man – citizen who uses the health system, ensuring quality services”, are the positions of the minority rapporteur and of the special speakers of the opposition parties.

The minority rapporteur Andreas Xanthos stated his vertical disagreement SYRIZA to the neoliberal philosophy that holds the bill and shows that the government understood nothing of the pandemic and how important a strong public health system is. You create, he said, “extra financial burdens and extra care inequalities.” Your strategy is completely ineffective and inconsistent with the climate that has arisen especially after the pandemic and the projects that have come to the fore. You have not done anything for three years to proceed with this reform of the PHC, you have not developed a single new structure. On the contrary, you devalue them, you use them -as well as the Health Centers- as a reservoir for the movement of staff and mainly doctors and nurses to the hospitals. Urban-type Health Centers did not go ahead and were not developed by political choice. You considered and still consider that “the establishment of the NSS is a Marxist-type intervention in the field of health”. He estimated that the Personal Physician would not go on to say that we “do not just want to have the citizens charged and assigned to a doctor of any specialty, baptizing the family doctor-staff probably for you”. It’s necessary to say another “culture” that your bill does not have. You are out of international scientific discussion and out of priorities and consensus in international Health policy. The whole core of the public health system is slowly being dismantled. We can not talk about grandiose plans, ignoring the fact that today we have a complete disorganization of public structures. The message you give to young doctors is: “You do not need to enter the health system”. He characterized the changes in EOPYY as a neo-liberal mutation of the country’s major insurance company. Make its administration completely controlled by the government. Eliminate social representation and participation, employee representation. You create conditions of opaque management of the big piggy bank, which are the resources of private insurance. Also, instead of making a serious intervention to upgrade the morning regular surgery activity at the NSS, which has shrunk dramatically, you are now opening a discussion about the possibility of hospitals operating in the afternoon as a quasi-private clinic, where the citizen will pay the corresponding percentage. when he is hospitalized in private hospitals, in private clinics. These are not serious things, said Mr. Xanthos.

Critic and his special speaker PASOK-KINAL Giorgos Fraggidis, stated that this bill is “to please the ears of the citizen but it is a blank letter and is a mockery”. He found that Primary Health Care in Greece has failed in its mission. The structures we have are fragmented. They have problems accessing, completing and maintaining patient care. There is understaffing, lack of coordination and interconnection of the units with each other, with the reference hospitals and the Local Government, lack of infrastructure and logistical equipment, large geographical disparities in the quality of services. Its underfunding has created an over-enhanced private health sector in Greece and a private health expenditure that disproportionately burdens individual and family income. And the bill does not offer solutions to these important problems. It is more of an exercise on paper, an exhibition of ideas with plenty of communication sauce. He described it as a “monument of sloppiness and disorganization with expediency”. We, he said, will not give you such a “white check” and attributed to ND that it is “captive to the ideologies of the past and does not want and can not compromise with the idea of ​​a strong public and quality National Health System”.

His special speaker KKE Giorgos Lambroulis stated that his party rejects the bill because “it is another reactionary step towards the implementation of exactly these anti-popular directions that for years now all governments have been implementing and promoting with their policies to deepen market laws in the Health services, the cuts in public spending, an even greater burden on patients and the public. ” The provisions of the bill are part of the implementation of the common strategy for health – European Union of Capital – which is accepted by all parties and concerns the adaptation to the needs of capitalist development to ensure cheap labor. EOPYY is becoming a tool for enhancing the commercialization and privatization of health for further cuts in benefits and strengthening the private sector. Hospitals are transformed into self-governing, self-financed units, the financing of which is not guaranteed by the state, so the income from the services they will provide will come either from contracts or from direct payments of patients. Market mechanisms are introduced in the PHC. He argued that the introduction of quality criteria for the evaluation and pricing of medical procedures of diagnostic tests does not solve the basic issue that exists in terms of patients’ needs. The service pricing discounts according to the age of technology benefit the powerful private sector business units that can invest in modern technology and attributed a new distribution of the “pie” of EOPYY on behalf of the private sector.

Her special speaker Hellenic Solution Maria Athanassiou stated that she will vote against the bill. He pointed out that although prevention is a pillar in Primary Health Care, this bill does not have any such direction, as it does not provide anything for the promotion of contraception. You turn, he said, EOPYY into a person with characteristics of Private Law for “convenience of mothers”. Health Centers are not manned in barren and inaccessible areas. You are not interested in rescuing the National Health System but in commercializing it. Service quality criteria from providers are obscured by ambiguities. He also noted, among other things, that the labor rights of TOMY employees are being put in uncertainty. He wondered by what logic, pediatricians are excluded from TOMY. He disagreed with the establishment of afternoon surgeries in public hospitals with the participation of the insured and EOPYY. Regarding the “clow back”, he stated that although it was a temporary memorandum measure, in the end it seems that it remains forever.

His special speaker DAY25 Maria Apatzidi stated that her own party will also vote against the bill as it “leads Health to even greater commercialization”. He noted that it does not provide anything for Municipal Health. It puts the profit-benefit ratio above the Citizens’ Health. We, he said, envision the creation of a Unified Network of Primary Health Care Units. Unfortunately, however, “this bill marks the loss of the opportunity for a radical change of the model in our country, of a proper primary health care”. The key cell of a proper PHC said is the existence of a team consisting of general practitioners or physicians and a pediatrician, with a coordinator and who will be assisted by at least one nurse or health visitor and a physiotherapist, depending on the needs of each patient. . Emphasize the prevention of mental illness and care.

Source: ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ