Regards, Ivan
Posted on 12/07/2002 5:59:18 PM PST by MadIvan
AS Gerhard Schröder tries to cut £60 billion from Germany’s health and welfare budget, a series of rolling strikes has compounded the struggling chancellor’s woes.
Opinion polls show that little more than two months after he was returned to power in a general election, 80% of Germans are unhappy with his administration. So short of money is Schröder that he has little room for manoeuvre with the striking public services union, Verdi, whose leaders have been infuriated by the budget cuts, defying calls for a pay freeze by demanding a 3% rise.
“Slashing welfare affects the needy — it’s grossly unfair to make them suffer,” a union spokesman said.
In the northeast of the country last week, the authorities in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, one of the poorest states, were forced to close a hospital they could no longer afford to run. “We have not been able to go on. There is no more money in the kitty,” said Gunter Gotal, the administrator of the University Clinic hospital in the town of Greifswald.
Nearly all the patients from the 880-bed hospital have been moved out and most of the 470 doctors have been told to stay at home or take a holiday.
“There was nothing else to do. Only the cancer patients and those in intensive care remain,” Gotal said.
Under pressure from local politicians who had hoped to avert the shutdown, many doctors and nurses agreed initially to work unpaid overtime. But the hospital was still unable to balance the books.
“They are not dramatising the situation — it is serious,” said Andreas Crusius, the vice-president of the national doctors’ association. He predicted more hospital closures throughout the country as the chancellor’s money runs out.
Opponents of the Social Democratic chancellor said his austerity measures would ensure that unemployment reached 4.4m next year and investors would be driven from Germany.
The chancellor suffered further ignominy last week as thousands of Germans sent him their shirts. They were prompted by a chain e-mail that accused him of “stripping the last shirts from our backs”.
However, Schröder won a brief respite when it emerged on Friday that at least one opposition official was not keeping her own house in order.
One of the country’s most prominent Christian Democrat mayors, Margret Härtel, of Hanau, near Frankfurt, admitted she made a 1,400-mile round trip to Warsaw in a chauffeur-driven municipal Mercedes at taxpayers’ expense so that she could have cosmetic surgery.
Regards, Ivan
And this is a perfect example of what we will see in the U.S. in the near future...Germany, of course, opened it's borders when they joined the EU and got flooded with immigrants...It then had to compete with the goods produced in Spain and Portugal...
It will all smoothe out when the Germans get their standard of living down in line with the the rest of Europe and they get used to using the Euro as their means of currency...
When wages drop, the tax base does as well...People quit buying and the economy falls apart...Oh, I forgot...They don't teach that in Econo 101...
If their so desperate that their hospitals are closing, you can bet that their security apparatus has been starved off long ago.
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