Hospitals will continue to be exempt from forced debt collection, following a bill drafted by the Health Ministry and signed into law by President Zuzana Čaputová on Monday. Originally, the exempt status for hospitals was supposed to expire at the end of the year. The new bill thus protects hospitals from the risk of being shut down.
At the same time, the president urged the Government and Parliament to address the high level of indebtedness seen in state-owned hospitals in an expeditious and systemic way that couldn't be challenged later in the Constitutional Court. Čaputová perceives the indebtedness of hospitals as a structural problem that none of the previous Governments have managed to tackle.
Source: TASR
Romana Grajcarová, Photo: TASR
