KDH Considers Draft Health-care Budget to Be Missed Opportunity

Bratislava, 15 October (TASR) - The opposition Christian Democrats (KDH) consider the draft budget for the health-care sector for next year to be a missed opportunity, MPs Peter Stachura and Frantisek Majersky (both KDH) stated on Wednesday, pointing to the misdirection of money in the system. The problem is not the amount of funds, but how they are distributed. "The Slovak patient wants nothing more than improved health care, not to wait at outpatient doctors, to have surgery on time, to get a doctor, to have the medicines they need, but none of that is in this budget for them," stated Majersky. Stachura stated that the problem with health care is the poor distribution of resources, and he pointed out that despite the fact that resources have increased significantly in the past ten years, no results are visible. He illustrated this with the rate of avoidable deaths and infant mortality, which, he said, are higher in Slovakia than the average for European Union countries. "Health Minister Kamil Sasko (Voice-SD) and former minister Zuzana Dolinkova (Voice-SD) simply don't know what to do with this ministry, they have no plan whatsoever, how to start, how to create certain systemic changes so that we can gradually remove these shortcomings," he commented. The Christian Democrats also presented their own proposal for where resources could be saved in the sector and where they could then be redeployed. For example, they spoke about the need to reduce duplicate examinations. Savings could also be made on consumables, among other things, and the money saved could then be used on more necessary things, including, for example, digitisation or a new generation of doctors. am/df