In constant conflict with the doctors and nursing staff in many hospitals of the country, Adonis Georgiadis recently comes, at the same time that the public health system is collapsing. His attacks on health personnel are not due to the nervousness that characterizes the substantive minister, but have a deeper aim: to open the door to the privatization of health.
Through his visits to hospitals, it has become clear that the Minister of Health has sharpened his attacks not only on ESY doctors but also on private doctors. Recently he even threatened freelance doctors with a subpoena and with the suspension of the right to electronic prescriptions if they did not appear … voluntarily to undertake duty and on-call during the summer in the understaffed hospitals of the islands. He went so far as to argue in his televised interview on (Open, 22/7) that “the state studied them, dammit. The state gave them the right to prescribe, dammit. The state gives them the right to write tests on their patients, c’mon.”
The specific practices of the Minister of Health have turned him into a red flag for the medical world, as a result of which many “blue” trade unionists in the health sector and not only took several phone calls to Maximos repeating the phrase: “Get him together”. As it seems, however, Ad. Georgiadis, instead of changing policy, listening to the concerns of the medical world and upgrading the public health system, proceeds to further degrade the NHS, discrediting doctors and nursing staff once again.
“People are dying”
Last week, the minister of health with “overconfidence” toured the Dodecanese in order to show through communication that he is with the doctors in August as well and that the NHS copes with its very important role. But the communication show of Ad. Georgiadis was deconstructed by reality itself, as in every hospital he visited workers complained about the huge shortages in equipment, doctors and nursing staff.
Characteristic of the “watery” Georgiadis in the Dodecanese is that last Wednesday, when the Minister of Health visited the Rhodes hospital, workers were waiting for him to express their complaints about the continuous deterioration of health. In fact, with the arrival of Ad. Georgiadis the crowd shouted “shame”.
The doctors at the Kos hospital had the same reaction, where the shortages are terrifying. It is characteristic that in the meeting with the minister the president of the workers’ association Garifalias Karanassiou said, addressing Mr. Georgiadis that “people are dying because patients come in car carts, because there are no ambulances. That’s where your politics and loopholes show. When the world has no doctor. People come to find a cardiologist and we tell them, “he doesn’t have one, go find one”. […] No doctor can bear to live in these conditions and no health worker. We can’t take it anymore.”
The arrogant answer
In these serious complaints Ad. Georgiadis responded once again with arrogance saying: “I know how to shout too and better than you” and “they have been voting for me for 18 years”.
The incident was also strongly criticized by Stefanos Kasselakis, who posted on the X platform that “the image speaks for itself (and it is not the first time in front of the “infidels” and the “little people” who save lives)”, recalling previous derogatory attitudes of the minister to health workers. In fact, the president of SYRIZA added: “All I have to say is that if a SYRIZA government minister ever behaves like this to public officials or citizens, he will leave at the same time.”
The… common goal
In addition to the constant reactions and complaints about the deplorable conditions prevailing in the hospitals, great reactions were also caused by the statements of Ad. Georgiadis from Kalymnos, who clearly showed the strategic goal of the government in the field of health. He characteristically said: “I am given the opportunity outside the political confrontation of the last few weeks to say that it has not been directly realized – and we are to blame, I am also to blame for this – that the public health system is not only the state system. The public system is the entire medical world, public and private. We all have a common goal together.”
“What minister of health could ever make this statement: ‘A public health system is not only the state system, it is also the private system’?” Who else would be so immune to dignity, except Adonis Georgiadis?” Steph wondered. Kasselakis.
“The public health system has been dissolved, by choice, obviously, politics” said the president of SYRIZA – PS during his surprise visit to the “Elena” maternity hospital last Friday. He confirmed the complaints of the workers about the sad picture with waiting lists and in infrastructure-staff and challenged Ad. Georgiadis: “Let him come here, to this historic hospital, to see the problems up close.”
SYRIZA-PS has criticized Georgiadis’ position by stating that “the insidious statement of Adonis Georgiadis, on the basis of which the public health system is perceived as one with the private one, essentially opens the door for the privatization of the public system with the following simple argument: since the citizen pays in the private one (which is, supposedly, a part of the “unified public system”), why not pay in the other one as well?”
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