Have you noticed how many Czech district hospitals have limited the time they answer the phone? They answer the phone at the switchboard, but they can’t transfer you to the specialist departments. There’s just no one there to deal with it anymore. And waiting times for tests and operations are getting longer and longer. There’s no money and no staff.
The usual concomitant of impoverishment. When a country is poorer and when it is possible to spend less on health care, it doesn’t “just” mean that we are getting poorer or “just” that there simply won’t be money for some treatments, it also means that the distance between normalcy and collapse has shortened.
Poor societies can make up for the lack of money to some extent. For example, when it is not possible to pay nurses reasonably, it is possible to supplement this with respect and prestige, which sometimes means ‘just’ kinder treatment, sometimes various small perks and advantages. In medicine as an industry this has always played a fairly significant role, but in recent years it has been broken up by charlatans who spread the news that the whole of medicine is one huge scam (and buy our natural preparation for 980 crowns, which is guaranteed to cure you, or you can wash it down with detergent and send us three hundred to spread the only really true truth).
As in many other areas, it is clear that the same civilizational decline is manifesting itself on both sides of the political spectrum.
