Sporting Chances
First the good news: we’re half way through the season for OPER, our women’s volleyball team and they seem to be a happy bunch. OPER has won all of their games so far and sit reasonably comfortably at the top of the table. If they can repeat this feat in the second half of the season, they will be playing at top level next year. Agor, the men’s basketball team, are doing quite well and might even be a position to challenge for the playoffs!
We would love to be able to bring you similar upbeat stories about Rethymniakos and Krisses, our men’s and women’s football teams, but if we did, we would be telling lies. Either Santa did not listen to our request in the December issue of the Bugle or the magic dust used had passed its sell-by date. So there is no change in their fortunes. We can only live in hope.
For more details on fixtures, results and standings, check out the sports pages in the events section of the
www.rethymnon.biz website.
Health Care Scares: Please Don’t Shoot the Messenger!
Well, it has to be said that the Bugle happy hippies debated reporting on this story at all as it was hardly likely to contribute to the ‘feel-good’ factor round our way and here at ‘Chez we prefer decent filter coffee rather than Maxwell House’ we like to try to be ’glass half-full’ types of journalists.
We write about the things that we enjoy here on Crete (about which there are plenty) and those things we don’t like we tend not to waste space on. We are different from some other publications in this respect. This might be partly to do with a valuable lesson that we learned some years ago from the editor of a (nameless) newspaper based in the Middle East who received a death threat which had nothing to do with what he had rightly said about the turbulent and volatile political situation but was far more associated with a scathing review that he had written about a Chinese restaurant in Cairo. Peking Duck? He very nearly was. Anyway, let’s get back to the point....
We had an attack of the consciences, and thought that maybe we should flag this issue. OK, so we can’t claim to be oracles, but this is what we know so far, and this is only our interpretation of what we have read and experienced in the last few weeks. At the moment it would seem that anybody who has signed into and has been paying into existing social security health care schemes such as IKA (equivalent to national insurance for PAYE employees in the UK) or TEVE (self employed insurance) has now been comprehensively shafted. Pretty well all the doctors in town have pulled out of these schemes for the time being. Maybe don’t blame them - they actually haven’t been paid for doing this kind of work for close on two years.
It has been mooted that a new umbrella insurance scheme called Ενιαίος Οργανισμός Παροχής Υπηρεσιών Υγείας - ΕΟΠΥΥ that unifies the old insurance funds should be created. The idea behind the new fund is increased efficiency. But its implementation might have been a bit rushed, to say the least, and the Rethymnon Medical Association maintains that this creates more problems in the primary care sector than it solves.
As a result most of the local doctors are refusing to collaborate with the new fund, resulting in a situation where people who pay into the fund also have to pay when they need to go and see a doctor. Double whammy. But maybe we’ll get there in the end.
Denise Delgado has asked us to express her gratitude to everyone for their help and concern after her fall on Sunday 29th January.
