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The need in the city of the Rhone was great, the not even more incomprehensible. On Tuesday, the Geneva University Hospital asked its Zurich canton counterpart to accept a first Covid patient in view of the precarious situation in French-speaking Switzerland. But the Zurich University Hospital rejected the request, at least that is what Geneva’s health director Mauro Poggia describes (61). The reason: in Zurich they wanted to secure capacities for their own operations, as reported by the “Tages-Anzeiger”. Annoyed, Poggia took the phone and described the situation to Health Minister Alain Berset (48, SP), after which he announced the tariff to the cantons on Wednesday. “It is unacceptable that some cantons continue to intervene in the elections and reject patients from other cantons,” Berset criticized in front of the media. Poggia twice in an interview with SonntagsBlick: “Solidarity between the cantons is currently not playing well.” It is “myopic” on the part of German-speaking hospitals that are currently carrying out elective interventions. In French-speaking Switzerland, hospitals have had to postpone all non-mandatory interventions in order to have enough beds for corona patients.
Together with the chief health director, Lukas Engelberger (45), Berset wrote a letter this week asking the cantons to reduce elective interventions.
“The hospitals themselves know exactly when to put the emergency brake on.”
But in some places Berset’s recommendation falls on deaf ears. In Zurich and Thurgau, for example, there is currently no need to reduce non-mandatory interventions. This also in the context of the fact that the transfer of seriously ill people to other cantons appears to be working normally. Corona patients from the severely affected canton of Schwyz were distributed to other hospitals in central Switzerland; Patients are also being transferred through the cantons of northwestern Switzerland. There are also 14 crown patients from other cantons at the Zurich University Hospital. Hospital management announced on Friday that it had no knowledge of the case of the rejected Geneva patient.
The former director of the Zurich University Hospital, Rita Ziegler (67), unlike Berset, does not see an immediate need to act. “After the first wave, it became clear that hospitals were more likely to be overloaded because non-urgent interventions had to recover in the summer,” says Rita Ziegler. And: “As long as the capabilities are available, non-urgent operations can also be performed. Canceling the interventions as a precautionary measure does not seem effective to me. The hospitals themselves know exactly when to put the emergency brake on. “
H + wants to see the money first
If beds were kept free as a precaution, hospitals would incur high costs. The H + industry association demanded this week that negotiations on compensation payments first take place before hospitals cut back on non-urgent interventions.
There is little understanding of such demands in federal Bern. “The demand for H + is absurd,” said Health Minister Berset. In the federal Berne, one takes the position: these compensation payments are a matter between the cantons and the hospitals, so it cannot be that the federal government has to pay the funding gaps.
Geneva Health Minister Mauro Poggia agrees that the cantons pay the costs of the beds provided, that is, empty, but not alone. The Federal Council must also involve the health insurance companies. “You don’t have to pay the full fee for empty beds like you would in normal times,” says Poggia, “you need a little creativity now.” But it could not be that the cantons kept the full cost.
Curafutura, one of the two industry associations of health insurance companies, does not want to hear about this requirement. Spokesman Ralph Kreuzer says: “Funding is a matter between the federal government and the cantons. We cannot pay for services that were not used, so we stay out of these discussions. ”
And so the federal government, the cantons, and health insurance are pushing each other. Always hoping that in the end the other person will pay and that you will not be asked to pay yourself in view of all the other costs.
