Patients Increasingly Lack Medical Insurance
The number of people turning up at the East Tallinn Central Hospital without medical insurance is on the rise, staff have reported.
"To briefly sum up the problem of the uninsured population, we can say this: the number isn't declining, it's growing. The patients are younger and their diseases more serious," said Jüri Ennet, head of the hospital's Long-Term Nursing Clinic and Uninsured Patients Department.
The problem, staff say, is directly linked to unemployment.
"The ones who are appearing in our clinic are more and more often those people who felt fine a couple of years ago, but after they lost their jobs they couldn't get back on their feet," said the clinic's head nurse Eha Rumberg. "These are young people in the prime of their lives."
Estonia's health care system provides free insurance to residents receiving unemployment benefits from the Unemployment Insurance Fund. Once those benefits run out, an unemployed person can apply for additional state support, which would also entitle them to medical coverage. However, due to the small size of the payout and the bureaucracy involved, many simply don't bother.
The nation's unemployment figure, which was 13.3 percent in the second quarter of the year, saw a swelling in the portion of very long-term unemployed – those without work for two years or longer. They made up a full 31 percent, or nearly a third of all jobless.
Statistics Estonia does not have recent statistics on the number of those without health insurance, rus.err.ee reported, but compared to 53,170 uninsured in 2007, the figure stood at about 84,000, or 6.3 percent of the population, at the end of 2010.
Steve Roman