Hradec Kralove, East Bohemia, Feb 15 (CTK) – Czech President Milos Zeman criticised the abolition of the daily 100-crown hospitalisation fee and said the money could have been used to raise the salaries of nurses and home care providers, at the start of a three-day visit to the Hradec Kralove Region on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD) still considers the abolition of the hospital fee the right step.
“I think that the president cannot imagine on how much money many pensioners must scrape by. I am glad that I have pushed through the abolition of the (patients’) fees,” Sobotka tweeted.
“The Social Democrats (CSSD) had the preservation of the hospitalisation fees in their manifesto, but they entirely unnecessarily abandoned this point, by which health care lost two billion crowns annually. They could have been spent on improving the pay level of nurses and home care providers, not of doctors, who have more than enough in my opinion,” Zeman said.
“I will be the first who will agree with raising the salaries, but I must ask where the money will be taken from. One hundred crowns daily for hospitalisation will not kill anyone. This mistake should be redressed,” Zeman said.
He was reacting to a statement by regional assembly member Josef Lukasek (Communists, KSCM) who spoke about raising salaries in the social services.
“People are lacking in the social sphere. They leave for car-making firms, for instance, and recently, they have been even attracted by supermarkets with high salaries,” Lukasek said.
The 100-crown hospitalisation fees were abolished by the Constitutional Court on the CSSD’s proposal in July 2013. The payment duty ended as from January 1, 2014. The government decided in March that hospitals will get 2.1 billion crowns in compensation for the abolished fees.
The regulatory fees in health care, which were also paid per visit to some doctors, per prescription and visits to after-hours were introduced by a rightist government in January 2008. Patients spent more than five billion crowns on them annually and about the same sum was saved since people ceased to go to see their doctors unnecessarily.
