Mass Support for the Hospital Doctors’ Strike on 21 October

Money for the people’s health – not for war and their profits

PAME calls on working people to embrace the hospital doctors’ strike on 21 October and make it their own cause. Workers and farmers, the self-employed and young people: everyone onto the streets, alongside the doctors!

Join the rally at National Resistance Square at 10 a.m. and the march to the Ministry of Health.

All over the country, we live the tragic situation in the hospitals every day. Months of waiting for an appointment or an operation. Makeshift beds in the corridors. Beds and operating theatres closed because the government refuses to hire the necessary staff. Hospitals in the regions and on the islands without basic specialties. Doctors and health workers are exhausted and are constantly redeployed around Greece to patch the gaps in the National Health System (ESY), with a direct impact on the quality of care. The bill falls on the people, who are forced to dig deep into their pockets for tests, medicines, and afternoon clinics and operations, for something that should be a free right for all.

This is the policy of profit, which treats health as a commodity and the patient as a customer. Every government has served this policy, and the ND government continues it today, following the EU’s guidelines. Public hospitals increasingly operate like businesses, with fee-paying afternoon clinics and operations, while the government cynically urges doctors to boost their incomes by plundering patients’ pockets. Hospital doctors refuse to become part of this racket. They are striking for wage increases, for mass hiring of permanent staff, and for a health system that serves the people’s needs, not the profits of big business groups.

When it comes to the people’s health, the government invokes fiscal “limits.” For big business and for war, however, the money is found at once. Millions go to provocative subsidies for the private health giants, the merchants of health. Money by the bucketload flows from the Recovery Fund, pocketed by construction groups for “green” and energy business in the hospitals. Hundreds of millions go to military missions beyond our borders and to armaments for the wars of the US, NATO and the EU. €3.5 billion alone went on the “dome,” leaky as a sieve, bought from the murderous state of Israel.

That is why the slogan “Give money to health, not to war” is the slogan of the whole people!

The people’s health does not fit into the “costed programmes” of the parties of military involvement, or into the war budgets of poverty! We support the just demands of the hospital doctors:

• Abolition of all charges for tests, prescriptions, and afternoon clinics and operations
• Mass hiring of permanent staff in hospitals and health centres, open recruitment for all vacant established posts, and permanent status for all contract workers
• Doubling of pay, and restoration of the 13th and 14th salaries
• Full and exclusively state funding of public health and welfare units
• Free heating oil and gas for hospitals

The hospital doctors’ strike, with the participation and support of workers’ unions and pensioners, is a milestone in a struggle that goes on!

On 30 October, dockworkers in dozens of ports on four continents will strike under the slogan “We don’t work for war.” The wealth we produce with our labour must go to wages, health and education, not to armaments and imperialist wars.

On 25 November, the nationwide strike must become a powerful working-class and popular response to anti-people policies: for wage increases, for health and education, and against the war economy that is crushing our lives.

Together with the hospital doctors, we are stepping up the struggle against a policy that treats health and human life as a cost. We fight for a single, exclusively public and free Health and Welfare system for all, meeting all the people’s needs for modern prevention, treatment and rehabilitation services. We are stepping up the struggle for health to be a guaranteed social good, not a commodity, and for the abolition of all business activity in health. We demand:

• Full, adequate and exclusively state funding of public Health, Welfare, Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation units, according to needs. No to turning public hospitals into self-financing businesses run on private-sector criteria.
• Decisive strengthening of Primary Health Care, with permanent, full-time staff working exclusively in the public system, and all the necessary medical equipment.
• Mass hiring of permanent, full-time, exclusively public-sector staff of all grades and specialties in public hospitals, Health Centres and other Health and Welfare units. Permanent status, with no terms or conditions, for all workers on temporary and flexible contracts, including contract and auxiliary staff. No dismissals of subcontracted workers in cleaning, security and catering; they must be hired on permanent contracts with full rights.
• No closures or mergers of any department, clinic, hospital or Health Centre. Full reopening of all the hospitals and public facilities that have been closed. Immediate staffing of the closed operating theatres with all the permanent staff needed.
• Abolition of health insurance contributions.
• Abolition of every kind of patient payment or co-payment for afternoon clinics and operations in public hospitals.

Money for the people’s health – not for war and their profits!