The worst of the cuts

It's 3 days since the last budget proposal is out. So far, most of the public anger has concentrated on the cuts in the retirement benefits (70% for working retirees, 10% for the rest). But there are far worse things in the proposal.

The budget for healthcare services (hospitals, doctors, etc.) is being cut by 42 million lats. If we look at the previous version of the budget, there were 336 mln lats for healthcare. About half of that has been spent in the first half-year - which means that there is about 168 mln left for the second half year. The amount that is being cut is 25% of the entire budget!

I don't know how our healthcare system will survive that. In many other parts of public sector (for example, education or public administration), the main costs are salaries and 25% cut means 25% (or slightly more) off from salaries. Healthcare has many non-salary costs: medical equipment (and, even if hospitals don't buy new equipment, they still have to pay off loans for the equipment bought in the "fat years" of 2005-2007), medicines, etc. Does one stop giving drugs to patients? Or does one cut salaries of doctors and nurses by 40-50-60% to achieve a 25% cut in total costs?

Healthcare Ministry official proposes higher payments from the patients themselves:

For example, if the medical investigation costs 50 lats (70 euros), the
patient pays half, the government pays half.

This also looks like a non-starter, since many people don't have 25 lats. If someone is earning the minimum salary, it takes them almost a week to earn 25 lats and there are so many other costs! Same about retirees (the average retirement benefit in Latvia is about 170 lats/month). And unemployed. And many other categories of people.

There was a previous increase in the patient co-payments in March and hospitals reported that many people started coming in only when their disease has progressed to an unbearable condition. What's next?