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Volume
13, Number 23 |
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Also
in this section: Special update: Doctors'
strike heads As this story was written on December 10, most of the public health care system's doctors and dentists were finishing their fifth week on strike and negotiators for the two sides were edging closer to one another on pay issues but taking increasingly strident stands. The strike has also expanded after the government refused to pay doctors who had been working to keep emergency services going, leading many of the anesthesiologists who had continued working but were not paid to reduce their working hours and physicians at the Hospital del Niño and the Instituto Oncologico Nacional to stage limited protest walkouts of their own. As this story was uploaded, the government was offering a two percent bonus and an 18 percent raise in base salaries, the latest of its several "last best offers," up from a beginning insistence that there would be no raise at all. The Health Ministry and Social Security Fund (CSS) doctors represented by the National Medical Negotiating Committee (COMENENAL) had earlier rejected a straight 18 percent offer, but were holding onto a demand for 45 percent, down from their original 60 percent position. On November 29, with its offer at 14 percent, the government suspended negotiations "until the strikers return to work," as Minister of Health Rosario Turner put it. That boycott lasted for a week, during which COMENENAL held firm, other unions voiced their solidarity and a massive embezzlement scandal within the Ministry of Education overshadowed all other news about the government, including its pronouncements against the doctors. The Torrijos administration has been buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of advertising per day to accuse the doctors of trying to bankrupt the CSS, and this has in turn infuriated COMENENAL. While these talks are ongoing, the government is proposing to merge the Health Ministry and CSS health care systems into one, with all the funding coming from the CSS. However, 60 percent of the health care workers work for the ministry and the government's plan is to structurally bankrupt the health care part of the CSS, with doctors alleging that the next step after that being full privatization of health care. The government denies any intent to privatize, but is proposing the extension of the San Miguel Arcangel Hospital formula, wherein formally public hospitals hire private medical service providers. The government is representing COMENENAL's objections to this as an intention to close the hospital down and leave San Miguelito without a hospital. As the war of words has become ever more radical, a spiraling cost of living and incessant scandals have kept the government from winning the upper hand in the battle for public opinion. People are annoyed by the shutdown of all but emergency services but not responding to PRD-organized anti-strike protest movements. All attempts at a "back to work" movement among physicians have backfired and threats to hire scabs have come mostly to nothing, with fewer than 100 doctors, including one Cuban, having been hired. It appears that the self-described working class government of Cuba, though not very sympathetic to the striking physicians, is not about to help the Torrijos administration to break a strike that's ever more about privatization. With the strike going into its 35th day no breakthrough was in sight and each side was complaining of the other's bargaining tactics. The government accused COMENENAL of sending bargainers to the table without plenary powers to reach a settlement, while the doctors scoffed at the notion of giving one or a few individuals the right to settle without rank-and-file approval and thus setting up the possibility of the government ending the strike by way of bribery. COMENENAL, for its part, has accused Turner and CSS director René Luciani of stalling on orders from above and demanded their replacement in the talks by President Torrijos himself. Torrijos, who spent most of the first weeks of the strike outside of the country, has popped up to denounce the doctors from time to time but has carefully shielded himself from answering reporters' questions about the dispute. The president's reticence is probably an indication of his calculation that the administration's hard line with the doctors isn't very popular and shouldn't be too personally identified with himself. Special update:
Also
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the Executive Hotel your headquarters in Panama City --- http://ww.executivehotel-panama.com
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©
2007 by Eric Jackson
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