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10 March 2004
AMSTERDAM — One thing is certain: an additional EUR 15 billion was pumped into Dutch healthcare in recent years. It is less clear what has happened to the money.
Hospitals and nursing homes have not been able to say precisely where the cash has been spent, newspaper De Volkskrant revealed Wednesday.
The newspaper cited a draft version of a report on the healthcare system that is to be published by a parliamentary commission next week.
The commission concluded on the basis of testimony from several experts that “pumping more money into an inefficient system only leads to more inefficiency”.
The investigation was launched on the initiative of VVD MP Geert Wilders.
He demanded to know how effective the EUR 15.6 billion added to the healthcare finances from 1994 to 2002 had been. During that period, government spending on health rose from EUR 23 billion to EUR 38 billion. Taking the last 15 months into account, the sector has received EUR 41 billion.
The Lower House of Parliament, De Tweede Kamer, has voted to provide this extra funding but has never actually attached conditions on how the money should be spent.
“Afterwards it is in general not possible to discover how the extra resources were applied, or as a result, whether the resources were used in a targeted way,” the commission wrote.
The commission also said that the information about the expenditure from 1994 to 2002 was so bad that further investigation would be pointless.
[Copyright Expatica News 2004]
Subject: Dutch news