The “Health” appropriations: balancing the “powerless…”

During the past two years of the crisis, patients lived on begging for their “health”, from the “pill” of medicine controlled by import mafias, warehouses and some pharmacies, to hospitalization, which has become the monopoly of those who have money. While patients experience humiliation daily at the doors of hospitals, the “Together to the Rescue” government’s budget comes to guide patients to… how to beg, as the part related to increasing the Ministry of Health’s appropriations, specifically in terms of hospitalization and medicine, did not hold much hope, so the additions were “cosmetic.” . Away from the slogans suggested by some that one of the objectives of the budget is to give the social health aspect the utmost importance, the “Health” appropriations numbers were far from those slogans.

(Haitham Al-Moussawi)

In numbers, the 2022 budget noted an increase in “the appropriations for medicines within the draft budget of the Ministry of Public Health, with a value of 397.89 billion pounds, to become 622.89 billion pounds, instead of 225 billion pounds last year (…) and an increase in appropriations for hospitalization expenses in the public and private sectors in the ministry’s draft budget by a value of 1182 billion pounds, to 1782 billion pounds.” In addition to these amendments, “1,732 billion pounds were put in place for the vaccination program and 513 billion pounds for the epidemiological surveillance program, in addition to 15 billion pounds to activate the work of government hospitals and support their workers.”
Away from the “annexes”, and with regard to the two main sectors in the ministry’s budget (medicine and hospitalization), the figures indicate adjustments ranging between three and a half and four times. While these percentages seem convincing for the drafters of the budget items, however, what studies in the Ministry of Health monitor, at least with regard to hospitalization, are less than what is required, according to Minister of Health Firas Abyad.
Between two margins, Abyad builds his conclusions: between the fourfold increase that the current budget proposes, and the perceptions of private hospital owners who reach a 9fold increase in the cost of hospital bills. This difference between the “two prices” means, without a doubt, that patients “continue to pay the high differences to the hospitals,” according to the head of the Parliamentary Health Committee, Assem Araji. A difference of five times is the value remaining outside the budget’s “support”. From here, Abyad asserts that what is presented is “less than the minimum required”, and that the budget “does not solve the hospitalization crisis, but rather eases it somewhat.” Therefore, “satisfaction” with what was “sworn” is due to the fact that “there is neither might nor power except with God,” according to Abyad.

White: The credits offered for the health sector are less than the required minimum

These concerns extend to the drug file as well, most of which came out of the subsidy box, and what is required today is “locking up” what was left behind by the gradual lifting of the supposed subsidy and filling the shortage caused by the Banque du Liban and behind it importers and warehouse owners.
In the most extreme of ambitions, the effect of this balance in the crises of hospitalization and medicine will not be more than “sedation”… However, the effect and sustainability of that analgesic is linked to what will happen in the dollar market. .