In the absence of a national system of health insurance, successive Armenian governments have for decades covered the cost of some surgeries, tests and other medical procedures. The beneficiaries of this subsidized coverage currently include cancer patients and some socially vulnerable categories of the population.
Many such individuals have claimed in recent weeks that the mostly private hospitals refuse to treat them free of charge on the grounds that they have already run out of government funding allocated for this year.
“The hospital just told me that the money provided by the state has run out,” said Gevorg Safarian, a young man who was seriously wounded during the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh. He was due to have an X-ray examination and blood test there.
Armine Khachatrian, a woman who recently underwent breast cancer surgery, heard the same explanation when she was denied a post-operative computer tomography scan in another Yerevan clinic. “They told me to come in the beginning of 2024,” she said.
Nvard Kocharian, the founder of a Yerevan-based NGO helping patients like Khachatrian, said that about 70 such women have asked her organization for financial assistance after encountering the same problem.
In an online poll organized by RFE/RL’s Armenian Service last week, more than 700 citizens likewise claimed to have been denied free medical services on the same grounds.
Health Minister Anahit Avanesian on Thursday categorically denied a lack of government funding for such services, which is due to total 118 billion drams ($304 million) this year, up from 112 billion drams in 2022. She linked the problem to the recent introduction of electronic registration for the subsidized coverage which gives priority to patients who are in urgent need of surgery or other treatment.
Other citizens eligible for free healthcare must now wait their turn, Avanesian said, adding that she has ordered the Ministry of Health to provide additional funding to hospitals so that they cut their waiting lists.
“If a citizen is signed up for, say, September, their registration date will be brought forward and they will get a service much quicker,” she assured journalists.
An RFE/RL reporter posing as the mother of a chronically ill child phoned several hospitals to inquire about a free service. One of them said it cannot be provided this year while the others refused to give any information at all.
