The condition of the public Greek healthcare
system is rapidly deteriorating following the Country’s economic failure.

Greeks skip prescriptions or self-medicate
because they do not have money to pay their minimal participation to
pharmacists or doctors.  [4]

State
Hospitals turn away parturient women without job or insurance and small income
if they can’t pay in advance.  [6]

Greek
patients visit free NGO street clinics that were set for illegal
immigrants.  [7][8]

Doctors
working in public Hospitals report that health services are collapsing.  [5][13]

Greek
Health Minister agrees!  [14]

Only two in 10 Greek women
regularly have a Pap test, or cervical smear. 
[3]

Greek schools are faced with
malnourished children that faint in class. 
[1][2]

References

[1]  http://www.athensnews.gr/porta…

[2]  http://www.athensnews.gr/porta…

[3] 
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4d…

[4] 
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4d…

[5] 
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4d…

[6] 
http://www.allvoices.com/contr…

[7] 
http://greece.greekreporter.co…

[8] 
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4d…

[9]  http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl…

[10]  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal…

[11]  doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61556-0

http://www.thelancet.com/journ…

[12]  doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61152-5

http://www.thelancet.com/journ…

[13]  Overburdened public hospitals are facing
acute shortages of everything from syringes to bandages because of budget cuts:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

[14]  Greek National Health System will collapse
within months, says Health Minister:

http://www.ekathimerini.com/4d…

Stavros Saripanidis, Consultant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology 

In the UK, General Medical Practitioners fought for independent business status in the National Health Service of 1948; and NHS Hospital Consultants were allowed up to two sessions a week in Private Practice, making NHS Elective Surgery the realm of the less-demanding less-well-off two-thirds.

Not surprisingly, long NHS waiting-lists developed, Private Hospitals flourished, and the NHS concept took the blame, address of waiting times even by Blair's New Labour resorting to and strengthening Private Provision. Winter bed crises have at times made increased NHS investment unavoidable, to the frustration of tax-cutting hopes amongst politicians. Temptation to starve the NHS, and to use NHS funds for political patronage, offers some explanation of policy over recent decades.

Long-apparent NHS under-provision in staff and education is on-going, despite the recurrent surfacing of 'headline scandals'.  NHS time, energy and money has been poured into often destructive proliferation of 'management', diversion from care and education in burdensome tick-box exercises, excessive installation of computer infrastructure, fabulously-paid work-experience for 'support' industries, patient-pricing and desperate deal-making in experimental internal markets, preparing the way for 'off-our-books' privatisation, patients once more to be at the mercy of fortune and fine-print insurance, our government, taxpayers and charities once more at the mercy of private contractors and 'lowest-bid public duty'.

None with evil intent, leaders in professions, in business and in politics, all have laboured with a fatal combination of weaknesses: inevitable ignorance, inability to trust others, and incapacity to hold the trust of others. Despite knowledge however great, no individual can know all: leaders need, as well as humility, the objective basis of faith in the integrity of advice from others.  Others, in turn, need to know the objective basis of trust in leaders, their equal status in the markets that together we shape. Knowing all others to be subject to Conflict of Interest, it become acceptable – 'just sensible' – to look to the interests of self and family and class and profession.

Without a context of full employment, and equal shares in whatever together we produce, rigid pursuit of 'efficiency' is necessarily callous. Those required or employed to wield hatchets will, naturally, tend to draw the line at self-sacrifice, at immediate harm to their own families. So, the well-placed prosper, and others come to 'know their place' as once the unconsidered poor, now the unconsidered 90-99-100%. Mammon is running all into the ground.

“Our 'choice' of healthcare outcomes, starts with our 'choice' of income-distribution: if not in good times, and not in hard-times, when might we 'settle' for Equal Democracy? Just before 'deserved' extinction may be too late.”

You are right with what you say above, because it is at  the roots  of the spectacular growth of the parallel private healthcare sector in Greece…Income decides for health outcomes… and will continue to do more and more  in the years to come with the impoverishment of larger social classes and the limitation of healthcare services offered by the public healthcare systems… I hear similar messages from fellow patients from many European countries…

http://www.bmj.com/content/342…

http://www.bmj.com/content/343…

http://www.bmj.com/content/343…

http://www.bmj.com/content/342…

http://www.bmj.com/content/343…

http://www.bmj.com/rapid-respo…

http://www.bmj.com/content/339…

Stavros Saripanidis, Consultant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology

Ruled by Conflict of Interest, there is – top to bottom – no escape from corruption, unconscious-subtle to deliberate-outrageous.

Corruption extends to the professions, even to medicine, inviting ‘public trust’ but failing to endorse democratic determination of the aims of healthcare.

Making a virtue out of necessity, our myth-makers have come to trumpet the cause of the individual, not just for aristocracies but across the whole population: we are thereby made hypocrites.

Though we see that no equality of ‘opportunity’ can survive in a casino-culture, we affect shock at the persistence of ‘disparity’ in healthcare and outcomes, across ‘classes’ as across castes, in fact across incomes spectra and between nations with different degrees of inequality.

So great is the fall in ‘economic command’ now being faced in the West, adequate control of our aggregate spending power – enabling industry to meet domestic and export targets – requires national rationing of income.

Those who should lead, the professions included, hang-back in thrall to petty fears, failing to advocate Equality for Democracy, perhaps in hope ‘we might still come out on top’, prepared as ever to ride the coat-tails of Mammon, discounting direct and opportunity costs for the children of all.

Our ‘choice’ of healthcare outcomes, starts with our ‘choice’ of income-distribution: if not in good times, and not in hard-times, when might we ‘settle’ for Equal Democracy? Just before ‘deserved’ extinction may be too late.
 

and a lot more in the political dailies…
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