In Greece the health and social welfare system has multiple failings. It funds its own bureaucracy excessively and underfunds the needs of sick citizens. It is illogically and inefficiently organized: I cannot imagine that there is any other country where fundamental medical care is provided by…
In Greece the health and social welfare system has multiple failings. It funds its own bureaucracy excessively and underfunds the needs of sick citizens. It is illogically and inefficiently organized: I cannot imagine that there is any other country where fundamental medical care is provided by social security funds and where hospital infrastructure and personnel are so scattered.
Massive amounts of funding are wasted on building and maintaining nursing homes and medical centers in every village and university clinics in every small town. Also there is widespread non-payment of social security contributions.
All these problems are very real and very large. We would have more effective medical care if the state curbed all this waste. But it is not only the frittered funds that threaten our health and welfare system. However strange this may seem, this system is also threatened by scientific progress.
According to a recent report whose results were made public in Kathimerini last weekend, social security funds will need to fork out -500 million to provide all women aged between 12 and 26 in Greece with a vaccine against cervical cancer. And the subsequent vaccination of 12-year-old girls will cost an additional -30 million per year. We should bear in mind also that the particular vaccine to be offered only protects against two out of three types of virus believed to be carcinogenic. This means the cost of vaccination in the future may rise by 30 percent.
Of course this money would be spent for a good cause but it is a huge expense; and this vaccine is not the only development to threaten the well-being of our social security funds. New and expensive medicines for illnesses which used to be fatal, new methods of diagnosing sicknesses, complicated operations, organ transplants, the list is endless.
Medicine is developing at a dizzying pace and although each step forward is something positive for humankind, it is fatal for our social security funds.
Years ago, when European economies were growing at a furious pace, healthcare was relatively cheap; so funding the welfare state was not a problem. Now rates of economic development are significantly slower than the rate of developments in medicine. And this is a problem that must be solved.
One solution is for insured citizens to pay the full cost of therapy, but this would not be fair on the poor. Another solution is for the funds to pay for everything, but this is wasteful and is not viable as a long-term solution. The best would be to split the costs between citizens and funds but doing this efficiently would require a complex system of calculation which could get bogged down in bureaucracy. Nevertheless, this deadlock has to be broken, and fast.
KATHIMERINI English Edition, 01/03/2007
