Cabinet signs off on final health reform bills

The sharp divide over the future of Czech health care looks set to continue after the Cabinet signed off on the final three bills of Health Minister Leoš Heger's (TOP 09) four-part reform package.

Trade union umbrella group the Czech-Moravian Confederation of Trade Unions (ČMKOS) has announced it is staging a fresh protest against the reforms July 12.

The protesters will gather at the Health Ministry and march to the Chamber of Deputies, where debate on the three latest reform bills is to begin that day in a two-day extraordinary session.

Dagmar Žitníková, chairwoman of the Trade Union of Health and Social Care (OSZ ČR), said the protest will take the form of a satirical mock "happening" to "portray life situations of how standard and nonstandard care would look like in practice in a funny form."

Žitníková told The Prague Post unions have not given up hope of preventing the reforms from becoming law.

"Things can still be overturned," she said. "So far, it is in the legislative process. Therefore, it can be reversed. We will do everything we can to make that happen."

Žitníková said that as well as unions, a number of other groups will also protest, including democracy activists ProAlt and representatives of people with disabilities, senior citizens, tenants and doctors.

She said the recent talks have failed to reach any compromise between unions and the government because both sides are diametrically opposed on the reforms.

"We attempted to persuade the government to change their perspective on health care, but as Heger put it: The whole argument is about right-wing and left-wing approaches; we want solidarity, whereas their right-wing policies are more about independence," she said.

For their part, TOP 09 believes their minister's program is "the first real change in health care in the past 20 years," party spokeswoman Alžběta Plívová told The Prague Post.

"The whole system will be better organized, from health insurance companies to facilities to medicine purchasing," she said, adding that patients' rights will also be improved by the changes.

Plívová said that progress to date on the reforms - one of the main objectives TOP 09 set out to voters - has "definitely been a great success" for the party, although she acknowledged that the Cabinet had not accepted some individual ideas - most notably, increasing a doctor's visit fee to 50 Kč ($3).

She added that "everything indicates the legal standards will be applied in time" to meet Heger's target of introducing all the reforms by Jan. 1, 2012 at the latest.

The three latest reform bills consist of an umbrella bill on health services, a bill on specific health services and a bill dealing with emergency services.

The umbrella bill is a mostly technical document that defines legal terms, sets out healthcare structure and establishes rules for handling health documents and patients' complaints.

The bill on specific health services updates the law to include conditions on assisted fertilization, sterilization, sex changes, human genetic inheritance and medical cloning for treatment purposes.

The final bill on medical emergency services establishes standard conditions for the service, modifies its budget structure and introduces rights and duties of rescuers into law.

About 40 new emergency service centers are to be established under the bill in a reorganization that will see fewer centers overall but still ensure an ambulance can reach a patient anywhere in the country within 20 minutes.

Many of the most controversial reforms dealing with healthcare fees, as well as the designation of above-standard and standard care, were all part of the first reform bill the lower house passed last month (see "Unpopular health reforms still on," The Prague Post, June 29, 2011.)

That bill could yet enter law as soon as the fall, because although it is expected to be rejected by the opposition-dominated Senate, the government can use its lower house majority to override the veto and send the measure for presidential signature.

ČMKOS has said it plans to file a constitutional challenge against the reforms if they become law, a move that the Social Democrats has already threatened, the Czech News Agency reported July 1.

- Klára Jiřičná contributed to this report.

Bill Lehane can be reached at
blehane@praguepost.com