Against the privatization of health insurance in Egypt

Committee for Defending the Citizens Right to Health (CDCRH) was founded last May by 21 civil society organizations as a reaction to the Prime Minister declaration no. 637 for the year 2007 that has founded the "Egyptian Holding Company for Health Care". The CDCRH hereby announces its position to the people and the press.

• Our opposition to the prime minister decree as it replaces the heath
insurance organization as a non-profit organization, and founded by a
presidential declaration, by a profit oriented holding company.
• Our opposition to depriving the insured people from the ownership of
the hospitals and assets built by their subscription money through its
transfer to the new holding company. The decree gives the government the right
to sell these assets in the stock exchange.
• Our opposition to the secrecy surrounding the preparation and issuing
of this decree without prior declaration of the draft to be discussed by the
beneficiaries and the civil society organization.
• Our opposition to the secret preparation of the new law for health
insurance and prohibiting the publication of the data about health insurance
and the annual budgets. We also denounce preparing this law without consulting
the national experts and the civil society organizations in spite of
consulting different foreign agencies.
• Our strong opposition to the inequity imposed on people by the new law
through providing different packages of health insurance according to peoples
means not needs, as well as the removal of some interventions from the
currently insured person as the Minister of Health declared in his example of
removing "kidney dialysis".
• Our opposition to imposing on the insured persons to pay one third of
the price of treatments (including surgeries, investigations and hospital
accommodation) and prescriptions. This act will deprive the majority of people
from many essential medical interventions, in addition, to the fact that it
runs contradictory to the essential principle of health insurance of paying
the premium in stead of being obliged to pay a good some of money when being
sick.
• Our opposition to the policies which aim at making the private sector
the major provider of health services rather than one of the providers. We
firmly believe that this policy will lead to placing the burden of profits of
the private sector on the patients and increasing the burden costs of
treatment on our people whom half of which lie below the poverty line.
• Our opposition to forcing the inclusion of the private sector in the
organization of the health insurance services "in place of the current
practice in which seeking private is an optional alternative only". Such a
policy will lead to increasing the cost and burden once again through placing
the profit margin of these private insurance companies on the shoulders of the
patients.
We firmly emphasis our principle stand that health is a right to every citizen
and not a commodity from which profits should be made. We firmly believe that
policies which lead to the latter constitute a danger to the stability of our
society and its development.