Just Don’t Ever Get Sick (2)

by Craig Turp on March 11, 2009 · 0 comments

in Media,Romania

We’ve written about the awful Romanian health system before.

On Monday, the New York Times published an article – a rather good one – about it too.

Tagged as: Bucharest, Health, New York Times

{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Parmalat March 13, 2009 at 11:31 am: Let’s go tomorrow, you and I and Gordon and try to win an auction for repairing a road. They won’t even allow us to bid!
I remembered a scene from a few years ago when they organized an auction in order to attribute the taxi lots afferent to the OTP airport – to a taxi company.
One single company participated in the auction because the officials stated in the participating conditions that the minimum volume of the trunk for each car that would use those taxi lots must be 499 litres or so.
And surprise… there were no taxi companies that had cars with that trunk capacity except for Fly Taxi which was actually a company created a few months before that auction! So you see what I mean?
Also let’s go tomorrow to the Bucharest Mayorship and ask for licenses to operate a taxi company in Bucharest. I bet you 1$ that we won’t receive those licenses not even in the other world!
Same goes with construction authorizations, other state contracts, even if you want to get a booth in the market to sell tomatoes you have to know someone who can introduce you to the administrator in order to pay bribe and get that booth!

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2 Parmalat March 13, 2009 at 11:19 am: @Bucharestian: my professional actions don’t have much to do with Romania; I would pay bribe if I knew to whom and for what, but the system is so sick that you can’t even pay bribe unless you know people.
I don’t deny there might be some succesful businesses conducted from 0 by the laws of business. As I said, I can be named as a succesful enterprise myself but the value of these businesses compared to the value of businesses made by bribing state officials is so little that they literally don’t represent anything.
People who do business with the state by bribing officials play in a game of ‘table’ or at the roulette the entire value of a legitimate business in half an hour.
I would bribe state officials too but I don’t have access to them because who managed to get a piece of the pie is not stupid to let go anymore.
In fact that’s my problem – those people won’t allow others to get anything, they share everything between them and that’s it.
So when I said everyone is corrupt I was refering to those people who split the country’s money between them because the rest of us – even if we put all our money together we can not match them.

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3 bucarestois March 12, 2009 at 11:22 pm: Andrei, no offence meant, but if this is the way you work, by bribing everyone, from doctors to government officials, this does not mean everyone does that. Romania is a corrupt country (look at Transparency International’s stats), but this does not mean that this makes everyone here corrupt. Either professionally or just living here, I met people that got good business by working and not throwing money around. Whether it is about http://www.roddia.ro or http://www.bbclinic.ro, just to name two random situations, there are also people that started slowly and had success by being committed to what they decided to do. With all due respect, as I do not know you professionally and vice versa, you are no god or makeshift Conducator to put the blame on a whole country the bad of which nobody denies. And no, I was not referring to people that drive USD 150,000 cars, I do not think that that expensive a car has anything to do with the “elite” term; the two might meet, but neither of them is automatically results in the other one. To end with it: if you accuse the rotten system but behave exactly like those you accuse, what sense does it make, ever? Either join it and agree to be labeled accordingly, or try to bring a change.

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4 Parmalat March 12, 2009 at 9:23 pm: @Bucharestian: “corrupt politicians, the nouveau riche, hard-working people that managed to have successful business here and are doing well,
the inheritors of old families that got their property back, or the cultural elite?”
Who are those hard-working people who managed to have succesful businesses here?! I don’t know any!
Romanians who managed to have succesful businesses here so as to drive a 150.000$ car either took money from Bancorex and forgot to pay them back, or bribed the state officials in order to get contracts with the state or forgot to pay taxes at a certain point in time.
Everyone who has made real money in this country is 100 corrupt!!!
You can not go from a Dacia car to millions of $ in 15 years time without being corrupt! Everyone is corrupt, everyone is compromised in this country, even foreign people who came here to do business compromised themselves, governments and corporations compromised themselves when they came here and paid hundreds of millions of $ of bribes in order to lay their hands on the state owned companies!
Nobody is clean in this country, when you talk about millions of $ in Romania you talk about corruption! The rest of them don’t matter, 200-300.000$ and a fancy car means nothing, sometimes when I look on the street I think that everyone has that money.

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5 Parmalat March 12, 2009 at 9:12 pm: @Davin: welcome back
No, when Ceausescu was President, his sons and other children of ‘nomenclaturisti’ (high members of the Communist Party) had their own groups but they owned only what other Romanians owned: a Dacia car (with a 1-B-xxx number, this format was reserved for the nomenclaturisti), an apartment and some electronic equipment around the house.
The most luxurious items that they had (and were missing from most peoples’ homes) were video-players, micro-wave ovens and stuff like that which was 100% imported.
Nicu Ceausescu had been named Governor of Sibiu and that’s all he had, nothing more or less than any Romanian with university studies.
Even Ceausescu himself had his official car made in Romania (it was an ARO) which had it’s most luxurious improvement – electric windows that could be opened by the push of a button.
What others are saying now that he had billions of $, hundreds of cars and jewellery is bull shit, they never found anything, Nicolae Ceausescu didn’t even have a house of his own!
Valentin Ceausescu lives in the 3-room apartment that he had since his father was President. And recently the court allowed him to re-posess some paintings that his father received as gifts.
Very few people had access to a Mercedes (there were some though), a Fiat or an Opel.
To make a comparison: back in 1987 my uncle was head of TAROM, the only air transportation company that we had. To be head of Tarom it meant that you were ranked as a General of Securitate and you had direct access to Ceausescu, Iulian Vlad, Manea Manescu and every high ranking official. My uncle owned an apartment in Baneasa, drove a Lada car and – due to the trips that he took outside of the country – he also had an IBM personal computer (!)
Also in 1987 he managed to bring inside the country a Zenith laptop computer which he donated to the Securitate because it was the only one that we had in the country back then.
The difference between high ranking Communist officials and ordinary people was almost inexistant. Probably the only important difference in terms of daily living was the fact that Communist officials could get food from special stores that had everything they needed and without waiting in lines. Communist officials could get Pepsi, meat, some imported food stuff etc… while ordinary people could only get these from the black market.
Ceausescu was a patriot and a real man of state, what he did – he did for his country, nothing for himself! Watch the pictures and videos, he was an ordinary man, just like everyone around him, he ate Romanian food, he enjoyed Romanian music and people actually felt that he is one of them. Unlike today’s politicians who smell like Cyprus and Switzerland.

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6 ellicsod1978 March 12, 2009 at 2:59 pm: Bucharestian: For me, an American, what I see walking around Romania is often almost undecipherable. What I mean is, is that I cannot tell if the people I see driving BMW, Mercedes or the fitze crowd are legitimate people. I know you can’t make broad generalizations, but in no other place in Europe that I have been have I found the people and society so perplexing as here. The people who have money all seem to want to show it so much that the guys often look like jerks strutting about and the women seem to be incredibly arrogant. It’s a vibe I pick up that I simply do not pick up, say, in Paris or Stockholm or London. People with money in those places act, for lack of a better term, like normal people.

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7 bucarestois March 12, 2009 at 11:17 am: I cannot talk for others, but I use a private hospital (well, it started as a public-private joint), the Babes and never had any issues, I call them, set an appointment, get fast service, never paid any bribes or was given the slightest hint I should do so. When I had an emergency with a German friend that go serious trouble, again, it was all fine, at our request they provided a doctor that spoke perfect English etc. I have friends that use the Medsana or Medicover and the same applies. But there are far more clinics one can use. I would not say their service is expensive. It is expensive if related to a EUR 300 – 400 / month wage, yes, or maybe even prohibitively expensive. But for prompt and efficient service, what one pays is what one gets for a change (and this is rather an exception in this country).

Officials in Brussels are well aware of how backtrack rural (and also urban) Romania is. I shall not get into details here, but officials from Brussels (and EU capitals, embassies, EU economical missions a.o.) travel this country quite a lot (I sometimes book some of these people in hotels). Let us be frank here: the EU is not about charity. It needed Romania, Romania needed it, a deal was struck and that is it, final. Romania changes and will change a lot for sure in the coming years, with all our frustrations and problems with its doing so or not doing so in the speed we wanted the change to happen. For the time being, changes are slow because people in this country are slow or inert, if not all the way stuck in the Middle Ages in terms of mentality, it is here that there is (a lot of) need for improvement.

Ceausescu was an idiot. If you get a chance, look at some of the reports done in the early 1990s featuring his houses and villas, how grotesquely decorated they were, the lack of any sort of taste and culture they show. His desperation for grandeur compares only to someone that builds a shiny palace and sleeps on the marble floor, his cattle all around. Ceausescu’s clan (as well as those in his apparatus) was doing well while shelves were empty. But there existed a huge barter-based black market and I would say that the biggest problem generated by Ceausescu’s rule is people’s indoctrination and the ‘imbecilization’ of a whole nation to the extent to which even 20 years after his fall, people can think of / do nothing better. As for “hop over to Hungary”, I fully agree with you, but the easiest thing to do ever is to make comparisons like that. Romania is not Hungary just like a hotel in Chamonix will never provide the same prompt service like one in Frankfurt. That Hungary has a hell lot of things Romania should learn from instead of typically mocking at, that is another story.

Davin, you talk about the “elite in Romania”; do you mean corrupt politicians, the nouveau riche, hard-working people that managed to have successful business here and are doing well,
the inheritors of old families that got their property back, or the cultural elite? Let us not put them all in the same basket.

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8 ellicsod1978 March 12, 2009 at 10:28 am: Sorry, forgot the link! Nothing like a Mazzerati:

http://casualderomania.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/elena-basescu-1.jpg

Did the Communist elites during Communism sport the fitze crowd look then too? I really wonder actually. I mean were Ceasusescu’s kids lying to London for the weekend to see the Stones while the rest of Romania had no food and Maramures was still stuck in the high middle ages?!

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9 ellicsod1978 March 12, 2009 at 10:26 am: Ok so where do people like Elena and her father go if they get sick?! Do they fly to a clinic in Austria or is/are there clinics in Bucharest that offer top level care for a high price yet free of bribes?

I hear she’s running for a seat in parliament. It’s really amazing to see the enormous gap between the elite in Romania and the rest of the society which mostly looks to be eeking out a subsistence level existence from what I could see on my 12 hour train journey from Bucharest to here in Baia Mare the other day. I swear officials in Brussels and other EU member states aren’t actually aware of just how archaic most of Romania is. Hop over to Hungary and the horse carts and medieval looking villages disappear.

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10 Parmalat March 12, 2009 at 1:36 am: Now we made it to the New York Times… so that the whole U.S. can make fun of us.
A few years ago in Afghanistan, the U.S. soldiers used to lay bets on which Romanian car (ARO) won’t start the next day.
Bucharestian is right – if we want more, we can go to a private institution. The good part is that the same very good doctors working for public hospitals also work for private institutions so we can also find them in an environment where they can profess at full efficiency because they have what they need.
I said it many times: if it wasn’t for the bribe our medical system would have long been abandoned! Students go to the University of Medicine nowadays because they know that after some hard years they can get bribes from the pacients. Also the few good doctors that remained are stimulated by these bribes because otherwise they would have been long gone! I know a doctor who left for Italy 10 years ago and now he is one of the most respected doctors in Milano, treating politicians, businessmen etc…
So either we pay doctors 5000 Euro / month salaries or we bribe them whenever we need their services. It’s not a bad thing, it should be legalized, be taxed and become public, it’s the only way to keep the medical system afloat.
And don’t tell me about the insurance that we pay from our salaries, etc… we pay the insurance so that the doctors don’t treat us outside, on the grass. If you pay like in Switzerland you get services like in Switzerland, plain and simple!

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11 bucarestois March 11, 2009 at 2:30 pm: With all bad the public health system in Romania is about, there is a way, even though not cheap and therefore not an option for everyone: go private, get good service and a bill for everything you pay.

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