THE CHAIRMAN of the House Health Committee, Andreas Parisinos of DISY, yesterday issued a plea for the long-delayed National Health Plan to be voted on before parliament dissolves for the May elections.
Failure to do so, Parisinos argued, would delay implementation of the universal health plan — which he said would in any case only come some five years after House approval — by at least another year.
Parliamentary party leaders are dithering about when to put the contentious bill on the agenda for the House of Representatives plenum, wary of possible opposition to the proposed law from opposition parties AKEL and DIKO. The health plan is also opposed by the powerful civil servants’ union PASYDY and the bank workers’ union ETYK, who both want their members to be exempted from the news state scheme so they can stick with their own health plans.
But Parisinos yesterday called for an immediate vote on the bill.
“The next parliament won’t be in a position to restart talks on the plan till October. That would be 10 months lost, and when debate restarts, by the time the new deputies have been briefed, we will have arrived in 2002 and we will still be discussing the bill,” he argued.
Opponents of the plan have expressed misgivings about the bill in its current form, but the Health committee chairman said there would be plenty of time to thrash out the details of the plan after the basic law was approved.
Following approval of the bill, the government would set up a health plan board, including representatives of worker and employer organisations, which would draw up the regulations for the government scheme.
“I cannot imagine that those on the board representing the hundreds of thousands of workers will not do their very best, their utmost, to get this institution to work,” Parisinos said.
He also said it would probably take “about five years” before these implementation regulations could be worked out, which he said was another reason to pass the bill immediately.
Parisinos dismissed scepticism over the suitability of the National Health Plan: “It will at last give everyone the right to equal treatment, equal chances,” he said.
The health plan provides for all citizens’ health needs to be covered in exchange for a standard contribution amounting to two per cent of their salary. Self-employed people will contribute 3.55 per cent of their earnings.
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