PRESS RELEASE

Greeks Die While Banks Are Being Paid

April 24, 2014 (EIRNS)—The massacre of Greeks under the Troika dictatorship continues. On hearing a report that a 40-year-old woman died for lack of health insurance, Metropolitan Community Clinic at Elliniko, Athens, issued a statement charging that the woman’s death proved once again that the government’s "policy of excluding our uninsured fellow citizens from health care means that human life is endangered and often lost. At the same time that the banks and lenders are receiving billions of euros, the government can’t spend EU700 million to help the country’s 3 million uninsured citizens—almost a third of the population (according to the health minister, that’s all it would cost). For how much longer do we have to count the dead who could have been saved with a modest expenditure? Will the prosecutor investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of this 40-year-old woman?"

The woman had been suffering from hypertension but could not afford the medicine, which would have cost no more than EU8-10. A single mother of two, she suffered a stroke and died. At Mytilini Hospital, where she died, the doctor who treated her confirmed that, had she taken her medication, she would not have lost her life.

The fascist Health Minister, Andonis Georgiadis, was confronted by angry hospital workers and patients when he arrived at one of the large hospitals in Thessaloniki. The workers demanded that the hospital sign a new collective bargaining agreement, which it refuses to do. Georgiadis’s response was to accuse the workers of being members of the Communist trade union, PAME. The patients complained of long waiting lines and poor service, to which he had no response.