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| (Photo credit: roberthuffstutter) |
Contributed To HellasFrappe By Janet Darbey
janetdarbey.thoughts.com
The little old lady in front of me leans against the metal rails and sighs deeply. Her coat is pulled around her shoulders and held in her arthritic hands against the cold and rain. She tells me in village Greek that she has already been here for an hour when I arrive at quarter to eight in the morning. We are standing in a crowd of around fifty people outside the IKA clinic in Corfu ,waiting for the security man to open up and let us in.
The rain is hammering down by the time he arrives and the rush for the steps begins...not fifty people now but more like eighty or so....many of them elderly and all needing to get to the front of the stream of people rushing in. We all bustle up the two flights of stairs to the office that deals with making appointments and stand in the queue with our health books hoping to be one of the lucky twenty that gets an appointment. That's right, twenty available appointments for all those people. This is only one of the many queues that you are expected to join for medical attention of any kind.
The phone on the side is ringing but no one is answering it or paying it any attention. I know that on the other end of that call is someone trying to book an appointment, but the staff do not answer the phone so you can make one. I wonder if the person ringing is disabled and unable to come and stand in the cold and rain in the queue to make the appointment. What are they going to do now? The ladies in the office are taking off their coats, sorting out their paperwork, drinking coffee or just generally trying to look busy and failing.
My doctor sent me here to make an appointment for a blood test to be done. It is urgent but it does not look like I am going to get one anytime soon. I am already too far back to be one of the lucky twenty today. I will have to do the same thing tomorrow and keep trying till I manage to get to the front. Perhaps I should come at six in the morning to be on the safe side?
I return at six the next morning and somehow manage to be number seventeen in the queue. I get a slip of paper and have to take it to another office to be stamped. Another queue to wait in. I wait and get the stamp after getting a disdainful glare from the official who sits giving stamps on papers all day. I then take it to the section that takes blood samples and get an appointment in five weeks time. But then they notice my blood tests will cover thyroid and they no longer do them in order to save money. I have to get them done privately if I want them done . I pay 40 euros and get them done the same day and collect the results within hours.
Meanwhile I return to my doctor and he tells me there have been some changes to the system. I can no longer make appointments by telephone to the clinic ( I never could do it that way anyway as they did not answer the phones) but I have to ring a premium rate number to get an appointment as it is all one system now. I take a note of the number but do not have much faith in the future for it.
He also tells me that he will give me a prescription but since the Pharmacies are refusing to give EOPPY (the health insurance system) any more credit, I will have to pay in full for the medicine and try to claim it back from IKA. To do that I have to go and stand in the long queue in the clinic to get the forms stamped by the official who sits there all day stamping them (who incidentally, is a doctor). Then I have to submit them along with my bank account details, and it might be paid in a few months. But I will only receive a small amount of it back.
The good news is that since he is also taking protest action I must pay for this appointment myself out of my own money even though I am covered by the Health scheme of IKA. Great!
After I leave his surgery I get to thinking about the health schemes in Greece. People who work here are paying in contributions that are usually between 250 and 900 euros a month. This includes the self employed in TEBE or the employed in IKA. There are other smaller schemes as well, all taking contributions year round. What is happening to all this money?
It certainly isn't being spent on the patients, who have to wait months for an appointment, then pay for their prescriptions in full because the pharmacists can't supply them under the scheme. The money hasn't gone to the hospitals, clinics, pharmacists or doctors either.....they are all owed billions of euros by the health schemes.
I tried to find statistics on the contributions taken each month and how much money people are owed when they have been paying for medicines themselves and I cannot find any statistics anywhere. Does anyone in the health schemes keep the statistics and publish them?
What about all the contributions people are paying that they are getting no benefit from? Where is all the money going that foreign countries pay for health cover for their citizens living in Greece?
And the final and most important question is who cares about the patients?
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