Greek health care workers are donating their time and helping provide free medical care for people who’ve lost their insurance because of austerity measures being imposed by the government which has put more than 1.3 million people out of work.
The Huffington Post featured their work and noted that besides the officially unemployed who are still receiving some benefits that another 600,000 have no benefits, including health insurance in a Socialist country which has set many ill people adrift.
Many patients, even if stricken with a life-threatening illness, being jobless are denied medical treatment, it was reported, and nearly half of Greeks now are uninsured.
Doctors, nurses and other health care professionals are volunteering their time and services to fill the gap as the government is providing almost no services, leaving it up to NGO’s, the Greek Orthodox Church and other groups to do it.
Since austerity was imposed, public health care spending has been cut by 25 percent or $12 billion. The salaries of doctors and nurses have been reduced and hospitals have been lacking funds.
Dr. Kostas Syrigos, a leading oncologist who treats uninsured cancer patients at a free after-hours clinic at his Athens hospital, explains, “In Greece right now, to be unemployed means death.” Because cancer treatment is so costly, he says, when the uninsured are diagnosed with this disease, “the system simply ignores the uninsured: They can’t access chemotherapy, surgery or even simple drugs.”
Medical costs for cancer patients especially are prohibitive and critics said people are being left to die because they government won’t help them at the same time tax cheats who owe more than $70 billion are largely escaping prosecution and sacrifice.
Speaking to the New York Times pathologist and volunteer Korina Liberopoulou stated: “Sometimes I come home tired, exhausted, seeing double, but as long as there are materials to work with, this practice will go on.”
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