Greek pharmacists have stopped giving credit to drugs provided to people insured by EOPYY, Greece’s National Organization for Health Care Provision, which owes the drug store owners scores of millions of dollars. Customers have to pay in cash, including those needing life-saving cancer and kidney transplant drugs that cost $880 a month and more.
Doctors have also stopped accepting state health insurance and are requiring patients to pay up front, complaining they have not been paid for performing medical procedures since the beginning of 2012, nor for medical visits since March.
As a consequence, crisis-hit Greeks will have to pay the total amount of their medicines and visits to doctors. “EOPYY owes us 570 millions since years previous to 2011, and 230 millions for the year 2012, amounting to 800 millions of euros. It is as if we have funded a big part of Greece’s health sector without ever being paid off,” the President of Union of Doctors, George Eleftheriou, said in a radio interview.
Costas Lourantos, President of the Pharmaceutical Association of Athens, blasted the government’s decision “to keep paying the drug store owners who continue providing medicines to EOPYY patients” saying that “should they put it into practice, then it is nothing more than a shameful action.”
(Source: Proto Thema)
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