non c'entra con la disoccupazione ma su herald tribune leggo:
Greek patients left without medicine as money runs out
Suppliers to state hospitals are withholding the basics, saying they haven't been paid for over a year, writes Karen Kissane in Athens.
I t's a bad idea to be old or sick in a country that's going bankrupt. Across Greece, medical suppliers, fed up with being unpaid, are denying state hospitals basics such as gauze and syringes. On the island of Leros, the psychiatric hospital can no longer feed its 350 patients.
In Athens, Yannis Constantinidis takes up a monthly collection from his brothers and sisters to help him pay for his mother's medicines.
His mother, 84, has dementia and other health problems and is lucky she has adult children to support her;
many chemotherapy patients are reportedly abandoning treatment altogether because they cannot afford or find the medicines needed to fight their cancers.
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mio commento personale: questa cosa è gravissima!!
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The broken health system is one of the major issues fuelling the rage of Greeks, already buffeted by severe recession and hardline policies of austerity. They will go to the polls this Sunday for the second time in as many months to try yet again for a workable government.
It wasn't supposed to be like this, Constantinidis says. His mother had top medical insurance and a good retirement pension from her decades working for what was then Greece's state electricity company. She should be living in ease.
Instead, the austerity drive imposed as part of the Greek financial bailout has cut her pension from €1300 ($1639) a month to €1020. The two women who care for her - one during the week, one on weekends - cost €960 between them.
Her €400-a-month medicines have to be paid for in advance and her insurance company no longer pays the full cost and takes three months to reimburse a claim - that is, if Constantinidis can find the drugs in the first place.
''Pharmacies are running out of medicine,'' he says. His pharmacist once had to make a trip to the other side of the city to fetch what his mother needed.
''The real scandal is for people who don't have any assistance,'' he says. ''I have no children and I wonder what will happen to me if I should reach her age? Here, there is no infrastructure [for caring for the elderly]. There's no planning. There's no policies.''
Most importantly now, there is little money. This week, the Greek media have been running hot with the story of a letter written by the director of the psychiatric hospital on Leros to the Ministry for Health and Social Solidarity, begging for money for food for his patients.
Yiannis Antartis wrote: ''We inform you that we cannot cope with the basic need to feed our patients, who are at this moment undernourished due to food shortages. The suppliers are refusing us deliveries of food because we are in huge debt.''
Zoe Grammatoglou, the head of the Cancer Sufferers Volunteer Organisation, warned earlier this week that some patients were cancelling chemotherapy because they could not afford it.
Pharmacists supported her claims of serious shortages of expensive cancer drugs due to public spending cuts and a reluctance by chemists to stock the drugs because they fear insurance companies won't honour patients' claims for them. Many patients do not have up to €2000 to offer the chemist for an upfront payment, even if they have the right to claim it back from insurers.
Athens surgeon Dr Kostas Vagianos told the Herald patients were suffering unnecessarily because of a lack of up-to-date instruments (for example, procedures that could be performed by keyhole surgery, with patients discharged the next day, were being done with large abdominal incisions, causing longer hospital stays and more complications).
Vagianos left the state system to work privately because he felt he could not guarantee the standard of care for his patients in public hospitals.
''There are shortages of food, toilet paper, lamps - including in the operating theatres,'' he says. ''There are shortages of syringes; usually you have to send the patient to the pharmacist to buy their own. The airconditioning is not working properly. There should be a flow of air to move the particles of bacteria away from the patient. If this stops, everything hanging in the air will fall onto the patient and the operation should be stopped - but that doesn't happen.''
Last week, six state hospitals lost all supplies of gauze, syringes and other basics indefinitely, angry suppliers claiming they had not been paid for more than a year and a half.
Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/world/greek-pa...#ixzz1xr7Ui0cO
