WHEN the idea of charging people that used the state hospitals, including their A&E departments, there was public outrage. The politicians protested, public sector unions threatened strikes and journalists expressed fears that the poor would be ineligible to free healthcare. But the government ignored the opposition, as the reform of the system was included in the memorandum of understating, and introduced hospital fees, as planned on August 1.
Since then, everyone has been praising the charges because their introduction had decongested the hospitals. As soon as fees were introduced, for visits as well as prescriptions, people stopped abusing the system. According to the CEO of Nicosia General Hospital, there was a 40 per cent reduction of visits from day one, while visits to the A&E were down by almost 50 per cent.
It was an amazing improvement and exactly what a much abused system needed. There will be no people going into the A&E department complaining about a tummy ache or demanding their blood pressure was measured. Nor, as an elderly gentleman told the Sunday Mail, would there now be pensioners “going away with bagfuls of medicines they did not need and ended up throwing half of them away,” because there are prescription charges.
We have the troika to thank for the reform of a very poor system that was a big drain on resources, was easy to abuse and resulted in huge waste. If it were up to our politicians this waste would have continued; it was the political parties that increased the burden on state hospitals by making more and more people eligible to free healthcare ignoring the mounting problems this created for their operation.
The troika introduced some rationality to the system – it proposed the introduction of strict income criteria for free healthcare, suggested the introduction of affordable fees for the rest and insisted that public employees could no longer be entitled to free healthcare. In the end, despite the strike threat, PASYDY agreed that its members would have 1.5 per cent deducted from their gross monthly salary to pay for hospital care. It might not be a big percentage but public employees’ right to free care has now been abolished, thanks to the troika.
The memorandum is putting in place rational policies that we could never have expected our populist politicians to introduce, in case they alienated some interest group. The government’s ambitious plan to overhaul the mismanaged and abused social welfare system by next year was another welcome, troika-imposed initiative. No extra money would be spent (annual budget would remain at €2.8bn), but there would be a re-distribution of benefits that would be subject to strict incomes criteria to ensure only those in genuine need, including the long-term unemployed, received state assistance.
We may even have a national health scheme in place by the end of 2015, again thanks to the troika, which made its introduction a requirement of the memorandum. To overcome the difficulties of the complex logistics, it advised implementation in stages. Another sensible idea that our politicians and technocrats never thought of in all the years they had been preparing the plans for a national health scheme, because they were never committed to its introduction.
There will be other benefits to the country and its citizens from the troika’s involvement in the running of Cyprus – the privatisation of the wasteful and inefficient semi-governmental organisations, the radical restructuring of the bankrupt co-ops and their placing under real supervision, the clean-up and rationalisation of the banking system as well as a host of other reforms. None of these decisions would have been taken by our populist political parties, which measure the value of every policy proposal in votes.
By the time the troika is finished with us, we may have a solvent, properly functioning, rationally organised state that treats all its citizens as equals. Some could argue that the price we had to pay – depression, soaring unemployment, dysfunctional banks – for this was much too high, but they should bear in mind that it was the self-serving politicians and bankers that put us in our current predicament and not the troika.
The troika is now helping us put right most things we had done wrong in the last 50 years because our ruling elite was unfit to govern. And if there is one reason to be optimistic about the natural gas finds, it is because the troika’s technocrats would have a say in the policy-making.
