A German health ministry envoy has painted a stark picture of Greece’s public health system in an interview with the Greek branch of Deutsche Welle released on Thursday, describing its current state as “catastrophic”. Wolfgang Zoeller, the ministry’s commissioner for public health policy cooperation with Greece, told reporters this was so bad that he “could not give it a grade”.

In an earlier briefing of the Bundestag committee on health concerning his visit to Greece – including his talks with Greek Health Minister Makis Voridis, the management of the primary health system PEDY, non-governmental organisations and hospital doctors – Zoeller had called the situation “scandalous and frightening”.

According to Zoeller, the majority of people, including the politicians, were unaware of how bad the situation really was, though he was careful to state that both Voridis and his predecessor Adonis Georgiadis, as well as the Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, “are politicians with a strategy and a desire to contribute. And this is my great hope. On this level, there is awareness of what must be done. The problem is in the implementation, in coordinating the middle echelons in the implementation of the laws and reforms. I think the ministry bureaucracy must do its work,” he said.

The way forward, according to the German official, lies in increasing the use of generic medication in Greece to reduce costs and he stressed that Germany currently used 80% generic drugs compared with Greece’s paltry 10%. “This should be possible in Greece. It is not at the expense of quality,” he underlined.

He also welcomed changes that will provide free health coverage for the unemployed without health insurance as of August, saying this was an extremely important step forward. Now it had to be seen how the organisational conditions for use of the health services would be secured, he added, noting that the finance ministry needed to release some 340 million euros in funds for this purpose.

He also proposed changes to the hospital funding system, suggesting a system closer to that used by German hospitals and said that the health ministry was favourably disposed to the idea.

Zoeller, who will act as the German government’s envoy for monitoring the implementation of reforms in the Greek health system, stressed that time was a major factor and expressed disagreement with the tight time frame imposed by the troika of lenders, suggesting that “it was realistically impossible to carry out”.

He stressed that urgent measures needed to be taken in the health sector, such as for the uninsured and for pharmaceutical spending, since they “concern matters of life and death”. Regarding changes in hospital funding methods, he said this needed time because, at the end, the new system had to be functional with working hospitals that people could turn to.