Last week, a letter from Domen Gorenšek, the brother of surgeon Matevž Gorenšek, who died from a heart attack in August this year, aged only 48, drew a lot of attention. The letter to MP Miha Kordiš was published on the web portal zdravstvo.si and in a few days read by over 400,000 people. Due to its extraordinary impact, we also published it on our website.
Lawyer Matevž Gorenšek has announced a lawsuit against the Left MP, Miha Kordiš, for saying private doctors are charlatans. Gorenšek announced that the claimed compensation will be used for operations of people who are currently waitlisted for surgeries.
Kordiš was very insulting to private doctors when he objected to them treating the sick at a session of the parliamentary health committee chaired by MP Anja Bah Žibert. The chairwoman of the committee issued several reprimands to Kordiš for his insluting behaviour, and in the end ended his speech.
Public healthcare and Kučan’s operation in Switzerland
Surgeon Matevž Gorenšek was a private doctor. The journalist and editor of the Siol.net web portal, Peter Jančič, reveals in his column that he met Matevž Gorenšek years ago as a journalist and explained that Gorenšek had already at the time pointed out the hidden consequences of the fight for the public healthcare, which SD at that time under the leadership of Dejan Židan was fighting for. Židan, he and Gorenšek were classmates, did not scream about charlatans, however, just as Kordiš is now, he was against paying for the work of private doctors. Gorenšek described that the government at the time used this argument to divert money for spinal surgeries to the public healthcare for several years in a row, which had never performed these surgeries. Operations could have been performed by Gorenšek, but they would not have been paid by the health fund.
The real victims of advocating for a such “public” health care were sick people who were not treated. These are the people on the wait-list now. “An awkward detail for the left was that the victim of the public healthcare was not Milan Kučan, who also had a problem whose treatment was prevented for ordinary people by the fight for “public health care”, which resulted in them not having the needed surgeries at the time. However, Kučan had his in Switzerland. “