By Anthony O. Miller
UNLIKE private sector workers, public servants – most of whom oppose a government plan to give all Cypriots free health care – ironically already enjoy free, first-class health care in government hospitals at taxpayers’ expense.
The grant of such privilege began back in 1956, when the island’s British colonial masters gave Cypriots working for the colony’s government free medical care in their hospitals.
That privilege stretched into today’s ‘acquired right’ to free medical care, which is jealously guarded by Pasydy, the union of the island’s public service workers, which is leading the assault on the proposed National Health Scheme (NHS).
The free medical benefits include:
– Visits to any government doctor, whether general practitioner or specialist of any stripe.
– Free in-patient care in any state hospital in a private room, if available. If a private room is not available, public servants get priority for the first available one.
– Private room care is automatic for top-level public servants, even to the extent that paying patients may be evicted from private rooms to accommodate the ranking civil servant.
– There is a third-floor suite of private rooms at Nicosia general hospital, reserved exclusively for public servants.
– Free medicines in government dispensaries, regardless of the costliness of the preparation.
– Free surgical care in all government hospitals, regardless of speciality.
– Overseas surgery is also allowed, free, provided a special committee approves. According to one top-ranking Health Ministry source, who declined to be identified, there has never been a case in which a public service employee was denied a reasonable request for overseas surgery – hypochondriacs excluded.
Retired public servants are also entitled to the same privileges.
Cypriots not in the public service, theoretically entitled to overseas medical care at state expense when the care is not available in Cyprus, are subjected to means tests and panel after panel of reviews. More often than not, non-public servants are rejected for overseas, state-paid surgery.
Some 15,000 civil servants went on strike island-wide on Thursday for two hours, from 11.30am to 1.30pm, to show their opposition to the government’s proposed National Health Scheme.
The walkout closed schools, postal and other government offices, leaving skeleton staffs in public hospitals and the civil aviation department. Police did not walk out, but their association made clear it supported the strikers.
Pasydy has brandished all manner of menace to turn public opinion against the proposed National Health Scheme, including alleging it would put private clinics into head-on competition with public hospitals.
The Scheme envisages people being able to go to private or public-sector physicians – general practitioners or specialists – and hospitals as they choose.
Pasydy has simultaneously taken the contradictory tack of claiming that, if the Scheme comes into being, public hospital physicians – 90 per cent of whom broke from Pasydy last year for failing adequately to represent their interests – would be hardest hit by the sea-change in medical care it would usher in.
The non-Pasydy government doctors, however, enthusiastically support the proposed National Health Scheme. So do the island’s private physicians, as represented by Dr Antonis Vassiliou, president of the Cyprus Medical Association.
Pasydy and other unions claim that under a National Health Scheme, their members would have to pay a bit more in health insurance premiums than they pay now for union-sponsored health plans. These union plans allow members medical care with private doctors and clinics. This does not include the free care public servants get in state hospitals.
The National Health Scheme proposes the state would pay half the Scheme’s cost, while employees and employers would pay the rest. Employees would pay two per cent of their salaries, while employers would pay 2.55 per cent of their employees’ salaries.
The total cost of the Scheme is estimated at around £200 million per year. Health Minister Christos Solomis on Wednesday said it would take about 18 months for the Scheme to move through the House of Representatives, and five more years to phase it in after House passage.
