Some Czech hospitals do not admit new cancer patients
Some Czech hospitals do not admit new cancer patients in reaction to a recent announcement by the General Health Insurance Company (VZP), the largest health insurer in the country, that money for oncological treatment has been exhausted, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes today.
MfD writes that it has at its disposal an e-mail in which the management of a large teaching hospital writes to its oncologists not to start treating any new patients by the year's end because the health insurance company will not pay for the treatment.
A new patient can only start to be treated if soemone else dies, the paper writes.
"I know minimally three such letters in three hospitals," MfD quotes Jiri Vorlicek, chairman of the Czech Oncological Society, as saying.
The paper writes that oncologists will meet on Friday to talk about how to create waiting lists for patients who urgently need treatment. The respective law, however, bans such lists from being created, MfD writes.
"The VZP refuses to publicly say there is a lack of money and it presses on hospitals' managements not to admit new patients for treatment before another ill person ends it. We propose to create waiting lists and to centrally monitor waiting times and those whose treatment could not be started," MfD cites from the one-week-old minutes from a meeting of the committee of the Czech Oncological Society.
MfD writes that according to Deputy Health Minister Petr Nosek, not only health insurance companies that do not save money are to blame for the situation, but also hospitals that apply expensive treatment where meaningless.
A ministerial audit carried out some time ago showed that even terminal patients receive expensive modern medicines, MfD writes.
Every hospital copes with the problems in its own way. Somewhere oncological patients will be waiting for treatment, elsewhere they will receive it, but they will not be administered modern biological medicines or chemotherapy, but they will be sent to radiation therapy, for instance, MfD writes.
Czech governments have been talking about the need to reform the health care system since the fall of the previous regime in 1989, but none has succeeded.
The current centre-right government, in power since the summer, has a fundamental health care reform in its programme, but it is not known when it will start taking the necessary reform steps.
Keywords: General Health Insurance Company, waiting lists
4. 11. 2010 Czech News Agency (CTK)
