Article - Health System Reflects Greece's Ills (Nov 12)

As you may know there is a crisis going on in Greece. The article in Wall Street Journal says that the crisis also affected the life in the country and in particular the healthcare. Greece's constitution obliges the state to provide health care to citizens. It actually kind of does but the system is a mess. It is stuffed with debt, plagued with corruption and hobbled by inefficiency and inequity. In some way the current healthcare in Greece represents the country itself right now. A slight problem now is that Greece on Friday swore in Prime Minister Lucas Papademos's caretaker government, which is expected to continue the path toward austerity that includes health-spending cuts that have been demanded by the international monitors of its bailout deal. The impact of this may be that pharmaceutical organizations can just cut off the public hospitals because they see all the bills on medicine that still remained unpaid. Because of this bad situation, public health care have created a large private system, widely used by wealthier Greeks, as well as a shadow system built heavily on bribes—the envelopes of cash known in Greece as fakelaki. These bribes can range from 20€ for a basic office visit to about 1000€ for a surgery. Of course, these kind of "gifts" are forbidden and in some hospitals there are even signs on which is a crossed hand giving an envelope. A study by Mr. Liaropoulos found that Greeks spend nearly as much on bribes and other "informal" payments as they do on "formal" costs such as insurance co-pays. Many doctors and policy makers suggest legalizing

the forbidden payments to help finance the hospitals. Another problem in the healthcare is that doctors prescribe medicine that is unnecessary. Some people say that the fakelaki are a consequence of low salaries. "Above all, the state needs to make clear what kind of health care it wants to provide its citizens," Dr. Patoulis said. "When it says the system should be free, it should be free. That means payment for the doctors who carry this out."
From this article, I learned that the economic situation in the country can easily affect the life in the country. For example, in Greece the economic crisis affected the healthcare. I also learnt that corruption is not always that bad. In Greece, most of the hospitals are in debt and they all need money. By getting money from the patients, they are actually getting out of the debt.