In Lithuania, from hospitals to community services, healthcare professionals have been becoming a rare commodity for years. Local authorities have then taken the field: not to train new specialists, but to grab existing ones. A lucrative slaughter game on taxpayers’ skin.

The municipality of Rokiskis, a district municipality in the northeast of the country, has apparently solved the problem of the shortage of doctors by providing generous financial support: an allowance of 50 thousand euros. The head of the hospital’s surgery department himself moved to Rokiskis tickled by this check, as reported by LRT, the state radio and television.

The subsidies of 18 thousand euros disbursed over five years filled all vacancies, and now only a few anesthesiologists remain to be hired because some of them will soon reach retirement age.

But if the hospital is in order, there is a network of family doctors that is a cause for concern.

The district’s 19,000 patients are cared for by ten general practitioners, and if even one of them decides to move, the situation could become difficult to manage. Not least because a third of working family doctors are now close to retirement. Hence the municipality’s promise to grant a generous €50,000 allowance for new specialists who will move to the city, the highest sum in all of Lithuania.

A painful measure for public finances and other municipalities. It takes courage and patience to liberalize and privatize to allocate healthcare more efficiently. But it’s the only way to turn the case into a win-win game. After all, no bureaucratic body is really held accountable for the misuse of public resources.