Reimbursement for free medicines

The lack of interest said to have been shown by the Minister for Social Policy in a request for a meeting made by the Health-Care Business Section of the Chamber of Commerce Enterprise and Industry, to discuss proposals regarding revision of the Pharmacy of Your Choice Scheme, should come as no surprise.

These "proposals" as the chairman of the section so disingenuously explains, would make the patient pay for his or her free medicines who in turn would be reimbursed by the government.

Not so far away in a back page article of the same issue (October 16) entitled The Government's Late Payments, the correspondent goes to some length to show that in spite of the EU Directive 2000/35 which came into force in 2002, and was adopted by Malta by Legal Notice 233 of 2005, the Malta government remains non-compliant and reluctant to make timely payment to businesses supplying goods.

It cites as an example "importers of medicines who are owed millions of euro for goods supplied to the Health Department".

It would then seem that in one adroit move the delay and hassle linked with being reimbursed by the government would be transferred from a handful of importers to a population of impoverished pensioners and invalids; the same whose waiting at hospital pharmacies the government is attempting to remedy, as from the frying pan into the fire.

The Association of Pensioners should have something to say on the matter.