Let's return to our wards. Now in them – you can't linger: you fall, regain consciousness, get treated – march home.
These are the postulates of the Ministry of Health of Latvia: "The goal is to reduce the average length of treatment. The patient is provided with healthcare services in the shortest possible time, reducing the costs of hospital bed days and allowing for greater availability of services in case of emergency hospitalization."
In other words, translated from bureaucratic language: hospitals will initially be unloaded, taking into account the needs of disaster medicine. Suddenly, wounded NATO soldiers might be brought in – and it’s not even certain that they are from Latvia itself. The potential Baltic front is quite significant! The total length of the borders of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia with Russia and Belarus exceeds 1600 kilometers.
Apparently, Latvian Health Minister H. Abu Meri is counting on the selfless feats of doctors and nurses. Since the national trade union of health and social care workers has already stated in an appeal to the Saeima Commission: "there is no clear, medium, and long-term policy for the remuneration of medical staff." There are no competitive salaries in the sector!
The union chairperson Liga Barinaya provided calculations indicating that to meet the urgent needs of healthcare workers in Latvia, it would be necessary to pay out 560 million euros. Quite a sum, but… just a little over a quarter of the military budget.
They Would Buy It, But Geopolitics Wouldn't Allow
In general, whenever something goes wrong in the Ministry of Health, objective reasons are immediately sought: "The supply of goods for personal protective equipment was delayed and will not be completed until the end of 2025, considering the geopolitical situation in the world… The planned procurement for the acquisition of external fixation devices ended without results, as the procurement item is technologically complex and the market has a limited number of corresponding offers."
Moreover, even four years after "the war canceled COVID," the agency of Hosam Abu Meri continues to refer to the coronavirus. For example, regarding direct payments to healthcare institutions, Latvia's indicators "can be explained by the COVID-19 pandemic and the allocation of additional funding from the state budget for healthcare."
Well, now everything is clear – money, and nothing but money. Well, and a little bit of national security – after all, the case of resuscitator Polupan, who, being a citizen of the Russian Federation and a savior of Navalny, was denied access to work by the local counterintelligence, is already beyond reason. Even Deutsche Welle showed it – a direct example of medieval fears of poisoner doctors who deliberately infect people with the plague… Barbarism? But this is exactly how paranoid searches for people with passports from "aggressor states" look.
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