Is there a cost-benefit analysis for additional ambulances? 🚑

Dear reader,

This is our weekly round-up from Greece.

An ND candidate MP stated that terminal cancer patients should be left without treatment because they cost a lot and will die anyway. Great outrage pushed him out of the ND election course. Yet, ND never hid they wanted to privatize health.

Three people died this week due to ambulances arriving late or not at all. The result of budget cuts and donations of vehicles proved problematic. 

A Greek Mafia person was murdered this week. The strange thing is that he was reported as the ‘shadow’ of a Greek oligarch while being murdered in a vehicle belonging to another Greek oligarch.   

No mercy for those with terminal cancer

This is among the top most outrageous statements of all time. 

“It doesn’t mean that we don’t love the patient if we tell him it makes no sense to do this for him/her. A cancer patient at the final stage won’t make it, and he/she does not have a good prognosis. We should at some point draw a line because it is complicated to cope with the expenses needed to treat some people”

This is what ND candidate Medicine Professor Spyros Pnevmatikos stated (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) in an interview with SKAI radio on Thursday. 

He then talked about the USA medical system, where he had lived for 13 years, and thereby came down to the cost-benefit ratio that should be considered for the Greek NHS. “So, they have to decide how much they can spend. It sounds a bit cynical; it is not cynical but humane.”  

Astonishingly, Pnevmatikos served from 2013-2015 as president of the National Bioethics and Code of Conduct Committee.

The statement triggered massive outrage. The hashtag #Pnevmatikos was trending on Greek Twitter until Friday.