FLORIAN BICHIR: “I cannot understand what happens in the Romanian health administration and I believe that neither Minister Eugen Nicolaescu does.”
Let me give you a recent example. The Romanian Executive decided, on the 22nd of December 2006, the level of food compensations in the public hospitals. Thus, AIDS suffering patients should receive food of about 4 euros a day, those suffering from hepatitis or diabetes should eat with about 2,4 euros a day and other patients should hang on with some 1,4 euros a day.
The decision states that this is the maximum amount of food that can be offered and that patients can always spend more of their money if they want more food. Meaning, if a patient wants a steak, he will have to reach out into the pocket and pay whatever costs more than 1,4 euros.
Offcourse no one knows what one could eat with 1,4 euros per day, but that’s just another small aspect.. Hospitals have contracted catering firms so that the patients would receive their portions, which often disappeared.
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A friend of mine told me about an anomaly. A certain hospital – let’s name it: the Clinic Hospital for Infectious Disease in Constanta – used this method and auctioned for a catering contract. A few months later, the catering firm asked the hospital to pay the TVA for the food. The fiscal authorities of Constanta didn’t care much and sent a bill to Bucharest.
The National Agency of Fiscal Administration which is subordinated to the Minister of Finance and Economy in Bucharest said that the hospital should normally pay the TVA.
The hospital in Constanta didn’t give up the fight, although other hospitals are paying the TVA. Thus they called upon a decision from the Minister of Health, which concluded that the level of food compensations is at a maximum level, therefore the TVA should not be paid.
So, who can you trust with a decision, the Minister of Health or the Minister of Finance? It’s a strictly an accountancy issue, which only Minister Nicolaescu could solve. Yet, something else bothers me. If no one pays the TVA, the food portions going to get smaller because no firm is stupid enough to give charity while doing business.
And that’s how instead of having a 1,4 euros meal – which in my humble opinion is far too less – the patients will have even smaller portions. And if the rest of the hospitals will see the situation in Constanta as a precedent, things will get a lot worse.
So anyway, could anybody tell me what one can eat with 1,1 euros? A biscuit and a glass of water? Romania is the only place where one must carry his food as he goes in the hospital.
That’s why the hospitals look weird. Have you ever looked at a hospital’s windows? They resemble with those of refuge: one could see food jars aligned at the window. That’s how, with bureaucracy and opposite decisions, our health gets sickened.
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