Alexandru Rafila says that there are family doctors who issue a large number of medical leaves and that they should be checked to see to what extent the leaves are justified by reality. The Ministry will support the health centers so that the new health insurance platform is completed as soon as possible.
The Minister of Health made statements on Thursday, at the Parliament – Photo Mediafax
“I think that the prime minister's concern has some justification or is justified, because there are, indeed, areas where there are too many prescriptions. I do not necessarily want to refer here to the pathology itself. What I mean is that there are either people who repeatedly take sick leave for some kind of pathology that, I pray, comes back all the time as a habit in a way, or there are doctors who issue a large number of sick leaves. I think that is where the verification actions should be directed, let's see who issues numbers, very large amounts of medical leave certificates and (…) we have to see if this is justified by reality. I think this is something that concerns the Prime Minister and the examples he gave were related to the frequency of sick leave“, said the Minister of Health, according to Agerpres.
Most medical leaves were issued for “spinal disorders and respiratory infections“. The government also introduced an additional 10% tax to discourage “the abuse of unjustified medical leaves“, as Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu explained, and now he wants to eliminate it.
The Prime Minister reported on Tuesday that 274,000 medical leaves were given for back pain and 187,000 leaves for sneezing and colds. Marcel Ciolacu is dissatisfied with the conditions for which medical leaves are given.
New health insurance platform, completed faster
Family doctors complain about the way the system provided by the National Health Insurance House (CNAS) works, just a few days ago, the College of Doctors from the City of Bucharest appealed to the CNAS to quickly solve the dysfunctions in the system SIUI because it disrupts activity in all medical sectors.
The Ministry of Health will support the health insurance companies so that the new health insurance platform is completed in the shortest possible time, Minister Alexandru Rafila said on Thursday, at the Parliament, according to Agerpres.
“What we can do is to support the health insurance companies, and we have done it recently, so that the new PIAS, the IT platform of health insurance, which is financed with European money, is completed in the shortest possible time in short, because the current IT platform is undersized, and when it was made, the maintenance and upgrade costs of this platform were not foreseen. It's about another platform, it's not about updating this platform“, said the minister.
Alexandru Rafila admits that the activity of family doctors is disturbed by the current CNAS system.
“I also found out that it was a problem with the famous IT system of the National Health Insurance House. It is about people with minimal income or insured people. Of course, it must be fixed as quickly as possible, considering that many of them, pathologies that require medical assistance, require the prescription of compensated or free prescriptions, and obviously the system must be repaired. The system has been working like this for many years. You know very well that family doctors are the ones who signal, justified, most of the time, system blockages, it confuses their work a lot“, stated the Minister of Health.
