TBILISI, MAY 12 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — While success and failure in Georgia’s acrimonious political arena are fragile, support for the Georgian Dream’s Universal Healthcare system has been consistently high.
Introduced in 2013, its advocates say that it has increased people’s access to healthcare and also given private companies such as Georgian Healthcare Group a huge boost.
In a survey by the International Republican Institute, 19% of respondents said that reforming the health service was the best thing that the government has done since winning power in 2012. The next most popular answer was achieving visa-free access to the EU, identified as important by 4% of respondents.
What the Georgian Dream government did was simple, said George Gotsadze, director of the Curatio International Foundation. He explained that it created a state- funded healthcare system that replaced an insurance-based system that only half the population had opted into.
“Prior to 2013, with public financing healthcare coverage was provided for 1.6m people out of 3.7m. The Universal Health Programme pretty much-expanded coverage to all the population of Georgia,” he said.
The government has also, effectively, cut out the middlemen insurers. It picks up the bills and pays the hospitals, run by private companies such as Georgian Healthcare Group, directly. In 2018, the Georgian government is expected to spend 3.1b lari on healthcare, up from 2.1b lari in 2015.
Most Georgians have seen a jump in the quality of their healthcare.
Teona, a Tbilisi resident gave birth to a premature child when she was six months pregnant. She said that she had incurred almost no expenses.
“My daughter was in an incubator for a long time. All I had to do was to bring diapers [nappies],” she said.
And this strategy has also spurred a major boom for business. Since 2013, Georgian Healthcare Group has expanded rapidly and now operates 35 hospitals. Spun off by Bank of Georgia, it listed on the London Stock Exchange in November 2015. Its shares have risen from 170p to 370p.
ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 328, published on May 12 2017)