Crisis choking Greece’s health system

Greece’s rundown state hospitals are cutting off vital drugs, limiting non-urgent operations and rationing even basic medical materials for exhausted doctors as a combination of economic crisis and political stalemate strangle health funding.

With Greece now in its fifth year of deep recession, trapped under Europe’s biggest public debt burden as well as being dependent on international help to keep paying its bills, the effects are starting to bite deeply into the country’s vital services.

“It’s a matter of life and death for us,” said Persefoni Mitta, head of the Cancer Patients’ Association, recounting the dozens of calls she gets a day from Greeks needing pricey, hard-to-find cancer drugs. “Why are they depriving us of life?”

Greece, a member of the eurozone that groups some of the richest countries on Earth, has descended so far that drugmakers are even working on emergency plans to keep medicines flowing into the country should it crash out of the currency bloc.

The emergency has grown out of a tangle of unpaid bills, with pharmacists and doctors complaining of being unable to pay suppliers until competing health insurers clear a growing backlog of unfilled state payments.

Greece imports nearly all its medicines and relies heavily on patented rather than cheaper generic drugs, making it vulnerable to a funding squeeze that would grow sharply worse if it were forced out of the euro after elections on Sunday.