“What I’ve seen at the public hospital in Thessaloniki has frightened me, I didn’t expect to find the health system so devastated,” said Yvon Englert, former head of gynecology and university professor at the Erasme hospital in Brussels. “The directors of the clinics, meeting each week with other leaders, decide what products they will not have for patients that week.”

The head of the solidarity centre Englert Urgences Grece visited Greece last summer, where he has been detained for several weeks. During his stay in Thessaloniki, he has seen that for three days all the surgeries that needed blood were paralyzed: a hospital that did not have a product to test hepatitis and AIDS in its blood... “The hospital workers have had to work in a situation in the Third World, but without preparing to do so. Tears tell you their impotence and the despair that everyone is forgotten.”

You can read it in the blog Urgences Grece: “In the cradle of European civilisation, three million citizens do not have access to health services. The infant mortality rate has doubled since 2008. It seems incredible that this happens in our modern Europe, which has as one of its pillars access to social security and health services for all.”

No to the Health Strike! They have launched a campaign to call on the European authorities to ensure that these fundamental rights are also respected in Greece and to do so they want to put in place a concrete measure: that the health system is shielded in any budget and economic programme, at least guaranteeing the situation before the 2008 crisis. Going back to health services in 2008... although it seems little to say, today in Greece it is a lot to ask.

The leader of the Greens in the European Parliament, Rebecca Harms, delivered in Athens in June to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, a letter summarising the dramatic situation. Since the troika imposed the first memorandum on Greece in 2010 on how to channel its debt, there has been a drastic cut in money and staff to the health system.

In 2009, Basque health accounted for 7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on the same average as European countries, and is currently down to 3.5% to 4%. Hospitals spent EUR 2 billion in 2012, last year 1.3 billion and this year 1.160 million...

The humanitarian crisis has begun to be seen in Greece since 2013, when the humanitarian crisis has erupted throughout the country. The infant mortality rate has increased between 2.7 and 4 per cent in 2012. Over the past two years, the number of births has decreased by 2.1 per cent, while deaths have increased by 1.17 per cent.

Among diseases, between 2009 and 2015 infarctions have increased from 1.4% to 2%, diabetes has increased from 7.9% to 9.2%, depressions have increased from 2.6% to 4.7%.

A study by the Institute for Disease Prevention last year showed that one in four patients who need a medicine on a daily basis has reduced the purchase of remedies for difficulties in paying them. One in five has completely abandoned all medicines, because they cannot be paid.

The cut in budgets has plunged public hospitals into a shortage of equipment and personnel. Some are sent material by humanitarian clinics organized with international assistance. Patient waiting lists have been lengthened dramatically. People with cancer should wait 4 to 5 months to get radiation therapy, which greatly increases the chance of death.

The report acknowledges to the Syriza Government the efforts it has made during these months, but adds that the results have not yet been seen. The priority now is to get the Greek health system out of the budget cuts programmes, the minister said.

Paying or dying the healing

The letter from the European Greens to Tsipras was signed by cardiologist George Vichas. Vichas is the founder of the auzolan hospital MCCH Metropolitan Community Clinic in the city of Hellini. Just like MCCH is doing in Hellinico with 8 smaller outpatient clinics in the neighborhoods, throughout Greece there are 50 others who treat people for free among volunteer doctors, nurses and many other citizens.

Vichas works on pay and out of time at a public hospital at MCCH. Tiring activity that requires a good physical form and shows a great deal about the crisis and the cuts: “For a year now, my daughter no longer asks me when the crisis is going to end.”

Like many other doctors, Vichas couldn’t bear seeing the shocks of many sick people who had fallen into poverty, people getting worse and dying for lack of money and means. In August 2011, Vichas was at the concert of Mikis Theodorakis at the abandoned military airport of Hellinico, where he heard the mythical singer asking for help from doctors to help the sick who were left without social security, marginalized from the health system by the restrictions imposed by the Troika.

After requesting authorization from the director of the public hospital where he works, who was also “concerned about the 40% reduction in health budgets and the dismissal of many doctors”, they organized the humanitarian polyclinic with a group of doctors and nurses in the old Hellinico airport.

To the German daily Der Tagesspiegel, Vichas explained that voluntary work is nothing more than patches, a probisional way of alleviating the suffering of people, that the objective is to quickly restore the public health system. And so bad is the public system ... “Last year they worked for months in a hospital in northern Greece without tweezers to tie umbilical cords of newborn children, because they could not buy them.”

Diabetics also suffer a lot from not being able to pay for insulin. The increase in cancer deaths cannot be forgotten, due to the lack of urgency and care of medicines. But in addition, there are three diseases that are the sign of the crisis: AIDS, tuberculosis and hepatitis. Vichas alerts Europe that these infections know no borders.

He disregards Dr Vichas – without forgiving his blame to the previous governments of Athens – the troika memorandum to the Greeks, which explains in detail the cuts in the public health system. “I’ve often wondered why they rape us to cut spending, knowing that they only manage to increase Greece’s debt. In the end I came to the conclusion that in practice they want to impose an ideology that says that those who have money have the right to live and those who do not have money have to die.”