Budget 2026. Healthcare.
You introduce "reform" into the budget, and what comes back to you is the rumble of an empty coffer, crumbling children's rooms, and silence in the face of a mother's cry. You write big numbers, but you leave out the smallest thing - the child. You plan "growth", and on the principle of "as it comes" you leave the future of the system - the young doctors.
The 2026 draft budget is structured to maintain the status quo: we pay primarily for illness, not for health.
The budget of the Ministry of Health is ~703.6 million €, of which 78.1% is for "Diagnosis and Treatment", and only 14.6% is for "Promotion, Prevention and Control of Public Health". An inverse proportion of common sense in an aging nation and high preventable mortality.
Capital expenditures are 46.6 million euros (6.6%), woefully insufficient for equipment, emergency departments, energy efficiency, digitalization, and more, and more…steps that should bring us at least a little closer to the 21st century. Yes, but no.
The state transfer to the NHIF is 2.378 billion euros, without clear conditions for results (access, quality, fewer preventable hospitalizations). We are “pouring money” into the model that eats it up, without healing the system, without healing people…
And the salary promises… through the back door. Six months of protests, three rejected bills, countless promises, and finally a seeming „solution“: the promised funds for salaries are being poured into clinical pathways, not specifically into salaries. We know the story well – the money does not reach the wards and people who are on the brink. Young doctors are hearing the old refrain again: „We’ll see, we’ll think…“ Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court confirmed that target salary funds are constitutional and necessary, but the government preferred what is known, what works for the “obedient”, not what is right and necessary.
What about the National Children's Hospital? With one hand, we are finally promising access and infrastructure to the future National Children's Hospital. With the other hand, however, we are writing down 25 million euros "in the forecast", not in the real budget, while it is being said publicly that the project will exceed 400 million euros. How are we going to build and equip a hospital with over 400 beds with numbers that do not exist "here and now"?
And to make the picture of complete shamelessness even more complete, the contrast: 15 million leva. That would be enough to renovate all the remaining children's wards in the regional hospitals. But they are not there, what is more frightening is that they are not even in the minds of the ruling majority. Because now, we are not even saying that children are a priority only on paper. Officially, other things are now a priority – the Soros commission and the restriction of the work of civil society organizations, while at the same time parents and child patients are experiencing this:
„"The conditions were unworthy of a human being, let alone mothers with babies. A room for one mother and child is shared by two; we sleep on one bed; there is no air. The toilet is full of flies, it is not used. The room is falling apart. I have a photo of my son, and it shows everything..."“
This is the photo from our campaign "Let's introduce the Ministry of Health to reality": a crib, a room that is crumbling, a systemic shame that is not repaired with clichés. There, promises of "April with a retroactive date" do not work. There, 15 million leva is the difference between dignity and humiliation.
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