The Cabinet has approved the first two national health bills, said Health Minister Georgios Pamborides.

They will now be sent to the House of Representatives for debate and votes.

The ball is now in the MP’s court, said the minister, adding that he cannot predict when the laws will be debated but that he is optimistic because the political decisions have already been agreed.

All the parties recognise how important it is to speed up the process, said Pamborides.

New taxes

The government is set to launch a new tax to pay for the national health care scheme, said Finance Minister Haris Georgiades.

The tax is structured like the social insurance contributions. Employers, individuals and the state will start paying the new tax to cover the expense of overhauling the health system, said the minister.

The amount of the tax hasn’t been confirmed, but if it is like the social insurance tax, it will be 7.8 percent of earnings, half of which is paid by the employer. Other than the sliding scale for income tax, each working individual pays an additional 12-19 percent in taxes, including social insurance, redundancy, and defence.

In the new model, hospitals are to become independent and run by a dedicated department in the Health Ministry.

In the future, Cyprus’ health-care centres must provide high-quality service to patients, and be efficient and competitive so they stay viable, he adds.

Entrenched inefficiencies

For the last six months, the Cabinet of Ministers has been scrambling to address the problem of too many patients and too few resources in the state health sector. But years of entrenched inefficiencies are taking their toll.

In spite of the best efforts by state doctors and nurses, there simply isn’t enough attention paid to managing this important sector in a hands-on way.

Successive health ministers are reduced to the level of talking heads by the hostile attitude from trade unions, and efforts to make a constructive difference are hamstrung by other factors, like a sluggish economy or corruption by a few amoral healthcare practitioners.

It has been too many decades since the House of Representatives and Cabinet made central state issues like healthcare and education a top priority, but now the situation has reached critical mass.

Earlier this year, a doctor’s strike was only narrowly averted, and a nurse’s strike went on for more than three weeks, endangering patients’ lives and forcing state hospitals to send operations to the private sector.

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