Sunday, February 15, 2015

Sunday Globe Special: Austerity Destroyed Greek Health Care System

I'm sure that was part of the point of it!

"As Greece faces economic crisis, bogus nurses set up shop in hospitals" by Danny Hakim, New York Times  February 08, 2015

ATHENS — They are the nurses of Greece who are not really nurses.

Greece’s dire finances have gutted its health care system. Universal coverage effectively ended under the austerity measures imposed under the terms of the country’s bailout.

No wonder the Greeks are so pissed and voted in the radical left Syriza Party.

Budget cuts have also thinned the ranks of hospital staff nurses, who are supposed to handle medical tasks such as changing IVs.

Now, when patients come to a hospital in Greece, they increasingly have to hire their own nurses just to receive basic care. While private nurses have long been a feature of Greek health care, the country’s wrenching economic crisis has left many patients with neither the money nor the insurance coverage to hire licensed caregivers.

All so blood-$ucking bankers and the $cum political cla$$ can live well!

Instead, patients are turning to illegal nurses, often immigrants with little or no training.

You can see where the refugee, immigration, and bu$ine$$ agendas begin to inter$ect, right?

The situation reflects the grip of the black-market economy on Greece, where even paying skilled workers like mechanics and plumbers under the table to avoid taxes is commonplace.

That's always the problem in the propaganda pre$$: not enough tax collected (when you are already overtaxed for the stated above rea$ons).

Frustrations among Greeks about the deterioration of living standards helped feed the left-wing Syriza Party, which came to power last month vowing to reject austerity policies.

They are outside the traditional $ociali$ts.

Thanos Maroukis, a professor at the University of Bath, England, who has studied the problem, said temporary agencies are taking “over control of the hospital’s workplace,” adding, “It’s incredible what’s happening, but it’s true.”

Nurses are just the beginning. Almost anything can be rented.

“We have the same thing with TVs, with ambulances, I would say with bedding,” said Anastasios Grigoropoulos, the chief executive of Evangelismos Hospital. “Or chairs.”

Chairs are carried in by strangers who rent them to groups of visiting relatives.

In many other developed countries, hospital security would simply expel unauthorized visitors. But administrators face staff shortages and impoverished patients. They also say they lack the legal jurisdiction to act without police intervention.

“Because of the crisis, the last three years, we see more and more illegal nurses,” said Grigoropoulos. “You can’t do anything.”

He has called the police, and a few days earlier, Evangelismos was raided. Several illegal nurses were arrested, but that is a fairly rare event because the police have had their own cutbacks.

Government agencies, too, have been overwhelmed. An influx of immigrants since the 1990s swelled a pool of cheap labor.

WHAT? That's what I have been pointing out, and yet somehow the propaganda pre$$ labels me racist. I'm a cla$$i$t if anything, and I'm not even that. I'm anti-tax, even when it comes to them.

These immigrants “filled the space and found themselves in every clinic and every hospital,” said Dimitrios Papachristou, a senior official at the Social Insurance Institute, a state agency known by its Greek acronym, IKA, which provides insurance and pensions to 2.2 million Greek workers, including nurses. “Why is that? There was a great demand by the patients” for cheaper care, Papachristou said.

Is that part of Obama's executive amnesty order? Help with Obummercare costs they are trying to cut?

Because most illegal nurses are immigrants, Golden Dawn, the far-right extremist party, has attempted some of its own “raids” on hospitals, advancing its xenophobic agenda.

Oh, there goes my Zionist War Media again with the name-calling. I beginning to take such slurs that really don't apply to me as a badge of honor these days. Certain political persuasions must be on to something.

But some of the real nurses having trouble getting work are themselves immigrants, like Eleni Souli, a 41-year-old Albanian who married a Greek man and works as a contract nurse.

I suppose that is kind of ironic.

She was sitting among a group of eight other nurses at a cafe outside another Athens hospital recently. All had studied for two to four years to become nurses, and they poured out their frustration. “They are not nurses,” Souli said of the illegal workers.

Maria Skiada, 54, has been a nurse for 23 years. She said she recently saw a woman who did not even use gloves when she cleaned up. “That is how you get bugs all around the hospital,” she said.

Racist Greeks, right?

Souli said doctors would sometimes be surprised at how infections spread. “When they see that in the blood work of a patient, they’ll see something and say, ‘Where did he get that from?’ ”

Why did Ebola and the diminished coverage just come to mind?

She counted eight illegal nurses at the clinic where she worked the previous evening. “At night,” she said, “it’s full of them.”

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NEXT DAY UPDATE:

"About 20,000 people gathered in central Athens Sunday to support the newly elected government’s push for a better deal on Greece’s debt. Protesters carried banners denouncing economic austerity and Greece’s creditors. Similar rallies took place in other Greek cities, and about 40 solidarity gatherings were staged across Europe and in Australia, Brazil, and the United States. The Greek government has enthusiastically welcomed such rallies while insisting they are spontaneous affairs. On Monday, eurozone finance ministers will consider Greece’s proposal for short-term ‘‘bridge financing’’ without the onerous bailout terms previously imposed on the country, until a longer-term solution to Greece’s crushing debt is found." 

Why wouldn't they be, and if they are organized so what? 

Obviously will of the people and not controlled opposition, based on tone of coverage alone.