Employees of the Interior Ministry have been left without health insurance. Some of them were turned away from chemotherapy, from diagnostic procedures, from laboratory tests. Those who sought medical care were told either to pay for the procedure privately themselves, or to wait until their status is regularised in the system again.

A police officer who is due to receive cancer treatment and is sent back from the hospital because the system does not recognise him as insured - that is the end point of this case. Everything else is paperwork.

Two institutions, two explanations

The Health Insurance Fund says the situation is not the result of a technical problem or a backlog in their system. According to the data they hold, the Ministry has registered employees reinstated by court rulings, and for some of them no corresponding contribution payment has currently been recorded for the period they are registered for. The Fund maintains this is a systemic mechanism applied equally to all legal entities in the country, and that insurance is activated automatically the moment the payment is recorded.

The Interior Ministry, for its part, says all contributions for its registered employees were paid with the July salary.

So the two institutions cannot even agree on whether the money was paid. The Fund is appealing for the issue not to be politicised and for no unnecessary alarm to be created among the insured.

This is not the first time

And here is the part that moves this case out of paperwork and into something else. The same thing happened at the end of June this year - again because of a record for an officer reinstated by a court ruling, again a break in the registry. So the mechanism is known, the cause is known, and no fix was introduced.

The Independent Police Union is demanding urgent intervention from the interior minister and a permanent solution so the situation does not recur. That wording is exactly what shows the problem is known from the inside and that nobody expects it to disappear on its own.

The Fund says the mechanism applies equally to all legal entities, and there it is right. But at an institution with several thousand employees, one unrecorded payment does not leave one person without insurance - it leaves many. That is the difference both sides in this argument know, and yet they keep passing it back and forth while somebody with a chemotherapy referral waits for an answer.