It looks like a real revolutionary concept: Health Care should be provided to insured patients according to the contributions they have paid to social insurance funds. The idea was put indirectly on the table by Rovertos Spyropoulos, the general director of IKA, Greece’s biggest state insurance fund for the insured of the private sector.
Speaking at a congress for the social insurance, Spyropoulos talked about the necessary preconditions that an insured has to have in order to have rights for health care.
“It is not the same if one has 0 stamps, 50 stamps or 100 stamps,” Spyropoulos said with reference to IKA stamps need for a worker or employee to be covered with health insurance.
KTG tied to imagine how the health care provision will look like according to IKA stamps:
0 stamps = zero health insurance
50 stamps = 1 injection per year
100 stamps = 1 injection + 1 aspirin
150 stamps = 1 injection + 1 aspirin + 1 x-ray
and so one…
According to the current law, one worker has to have at least 50 stamps per year to enjoy health care. Recently the Greek government initiated health care coverage also for unemployed thus raising the participation health care fees for the insured.
The news of “proportional health care” triggered an outrage, and Labor Minister Yiannis Vroutsis rushed to refute Spyropoulos’ statement saying “it was Spyropoulos’ own thoughts,” and that “the government was no planning such a scheme.”
Ever since the loan agreements and austerity programs applied in Greece, insured patients saw their health care expenditure skyrocket due to strict cuts in the health care. Prescription medicine participation went up to even 70%, several blood tests and other medical examinations and tests have been excluded from the prescription list.
The irony is to hear such a proposal by someone like Spyropoulos – “public administrator” by profession – who has spent all of his working life occupying public administration and unionist positions, ever since he joined PASOK in 1974.
PS I wonder why they, there in Socialist PASOK, wonder about their thin rates in public opinion polls…
