Capital investment in healthcare is down by 62 percent in these four years under SDSM, said VMRO-DPMNE official Ilija Dimovski, pointing to one of the reasons why Macedonia’s public healthcare system is so inadequately prepared to handle the coronavirus crisis.
Between 2013 and 2016, the last full four years under VMRO, there were 118.7 million EUR planned in capital investments in public healthcare and 99 million of them were actually implemented. But between 2017 and 2020, under SDSM, there were 56.8 million EUR planned and just 38.1 million implemented. SDSM reduced capital investment in our healthcare by 62 percent. This leads to lack of infrastructure. As an example, under VMRO, a total of 140 ambulance vehicles were bought. Under SDSM – just 12, Dimovski said.
The head of the Strumica hospital was pressured to delete a Facebook post yesterday in which he was pleading for public donations to purchase an ambulance vehicle.
Even more disturbingly, SDSM stopped the planned construction of a major new expansion to the Mother Teresa clinic center in downtown Skopje. SDSM officials said that they will build a much larger center outside of the city, but work there is just in the planning stages. The expansion SDSM nixed was about to break ground in 2017 and could’ve provided a much needed boost in capacity during the coronavirus crisis.
Comments are closed for this post.