The quotes are from Theodoros Giannaros in a New York Times article featured in SLL, “At The Street Level, Greece Is Grinding To A Halt,” 5/27/15:
As for the hospitals, even though they are taking in twice as many patients now, their budgets have been cut to the bone. In the first four months of this year, health officials say that the 140 or so public hospitals in Greece received just €43 million from the state — down from €650 million during the same period last year.
Sitting at his desk at the start of yet another 20-hour-plus workday, Theodoros Giannaros, the head of Elpis Hospital in Athens, chain-smoked cigarettes and signed off on a pile of spending requests that he said he knew would not be fulfilled.
Since he started work at the hospital in 2010, Mr. Giannaros has seen his salary shrink to €1,200 a month, from €7,400. His annual budget, once €20 million, is now €6 million, and the number of practicing doctors has been reduced to 200 from 250.
Like almost everyone in Greece, he is making do with less. The hospital recycles instruments; buys the cheapest surgical gloves on the market (they occasionally rip in the middle of operations, he says); and uses primarily generic drugs.
“We have learned that we can live with a lot of money and survive with nothing,” he said. “Maybe the crisis makes us better people — but these better people will die if the crisis continues.”
Mr. Giannaros, who is 58, says he recently suffered a heart attack from the constant stress. But he says it is his surgeons he worries about most.
In aging, depression-ridden Greece, treating the 150 or so patients that come to his hospital each day has put an extraordinary strain on his shrinking corps of doctors.
The fact that many have begun to strike because they are not getting paid for overtime makes matters worse.
Striding across the hospital grounds, Mr. Giannaros waved over his star surgeon, Dimitris Tsantzalos.
How many operations did you do last year, he asked.
“About 1,500,” said Dr. Tsantzalos, who, with his strapping build, seems younger than his 63 years.
Recently he says he put in a month of consecutive 20-hour days and, not surprisingly, confesses to exhaustion.
“I am burnt out,” he said. “It’s very dangerous for the patients.”
A week later, a tragedy struck Mr. Giannaros: His 26-year-old son, Patrick, committed suicide by jumping in front of an Athens subway train.
“There was just an emptiness in front of him,” Mr. Giannaros said between wrenching sobs in a brief telephone conversation. “The emptiness of the future they have taken away from us.”
His son had finished university studies and, unable to find work in a country where more than half the young are jobless, was helping Mr. Giannaros at the hospital.
“He saw no future, no way to help his family,” Mr. Giannaros said. “Now God has found him a job — as an angel.”
While Mr. Giannaros said he understood the importance of staying current with important creditors like the I.M.F., he said enough was enough.
“They can take their money,” he said, using an expletive. “I feel ashamed to be a European.”
Setting aside any finger-pointing as to who is to blame for this state of affairs, there are simple, inescapable facts: Greece spent more money than it had for many years, and now it will have to make far more than it spends for many years, and many of its people will be in misery. Send anyone here in the US that claims “deficits don’t matter” the link to this article.
