The Fruits of Austerity

If anyone wants to view what will happen when the Republican/Teabaggers finally defund all elements of government that hold society together, they need only look to Greece, a victim of European Austerians for the last half dozen years.

Greece’s dire finances have gutted its health care system. Universal coverage effectively ended under the austerity measures imposed under the terms of the country’s bailout. Budget cuts have also thinned the ranks of hospital staff nurses, who are supposed to handle medical tasks like changing IVs.

Now, when patients come to a hospital in Greece, they increasingly have to hire their own nurses just to receive basic care. While private nurses have long been a feature of Greek health care, the country’s wrenching economic crisis has left many patients with neither the money nor the insurance coverage to hire licensed caregivers.

Instead, patients are turning to illegal nurses, often immigrants with little or no training. One top official said he believed that half of the nursing care came from 18,000 illegal providers.

The situation reflects the grip of the black-market economy on Greece, where even paying skilled workers like mechanics and plumbers under the table to avoid taxes is commonplace. Frustrations among Greeks over the deterioration of living standards helped feed the left-wing Syriza Party, which came to power last month vowing to reject austerity policies.

Illegal nurses typically pose as family members or say they are longtime personal employees of a patient. In reality, temp agencies employing these women send men into the hospitals to distribute business cards advertising 12 hours of nursing care for less than $60. By contrast, a contract nurse at another hospital, Sotiria, costs nearly $70 for 6 hours and 40 minutes, though those who still have insurance can be reimbursed for about a third of the cost.

Thanos Maroukis, a professor at the University of Bath, England, who has studied the problem, said temporary agencies are taking “over control of the hospital’s workplace,” adding, “It’s incredible what’s happening, but it’s true.”

Nurses are just the beginning. Almost anything can be rented.

“We have the same thing with TVs, with ambulances, I would say with bedding,” said Anastasios Grigoropoulos, the chief executive of Evangelismos Hospital. “Or chairs.”
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Chairs are carried in by strangers who rent them to groups of visiting relatives. Or they bring televisions.

From having a functioning universal health care system, Greece has been hammered down to the level of a Libertarians wet dream in a country where everything can be bought and too many can't afford it.