A second ordeal for families: pay to save your loved one, then fight the state for it

Opinion doctorsfinancehealthpatients A second ordeal for families: pay to save your loved one, then fight the state for it Therapeia Giorgos Kallinikou 9/09/2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber Somewhere in Cyprus right now, a family is packing a suitcase. Not for a holiday. Because the treatment their husband, wife, child or parent needs doesn’t exist here, and there’s no other option but to get on a plane and find it abroad. That’s hard enough. The patient already has their own battle, one tied directly to staying alive. What nobody should have to fight on top of that is the state itself, but that’s exactly what happens. While the person they love fights for their health abroad, the family back home is filling out forms, chasing payments, and watching the bills pile up. And they pile up fast. Flights, a place to stay, food, getting around a foreign city, none of it comes cheap, and none of it pauses the bills still due back in Cyprus. Often it costs them their income too. A parent who has to be at their child’s bedside can’t also be at work. A spouse caring for their partner abroad may not be able to keep their job running as normal. As Marilena Panayi put it, income can collapse to almost nothing, sometimes overnight. Here’s where it gets absurd: the state doesn’t look at what a family has now. It looks at what they earned last year. A payslip from twelve months ago tells you nothing about a household in the middle of a medical crisis. Life isn’t a tax return. It doesn’t fit in a box with a number in it. Nobody’s asking for the rules to disappear, or for money to be handed out with no checks at all. What’s needed is far simpler: rules that serve people, instead of people having to serve the rules. It’s the same story with how long the money takes to arrive. Families who have to fly out at a moment’s notice, often on money they may have had to borrow, can’t wait months to get it back. Bills need paying on time, not eventually. Left too long, they stop being a bill and start being a weight that crushes families who had little to spare in the first place. Then there’s the question of who actually needs to travel. Right now, a companion for an adult patient can be treated as optional, as though it’s a nice-to-have rather than a necessity. It isn’t. Some patients simply cannot manage alone in a foreign country: getting to appointments, taking medication correctly, speaking to doctors, everyday care. Someone has to be there. That’s not a luxury. And when the case involves a living-donor transplant, say a parent giving an organ to their own child, there aren’t even two roles to argue about. There are two patients. Both are having surgery. Both need care afterwards. None of this fits the state’s own paperwork, which still assumes one patient, one companion. Illness doesn’t work that way, and neither should the system meant to help people through it. The changes reportedly under review at the Health Ministry need to happen, and they need to happen now: a proper look at how income is assessed, faster payments, advances where possible, different handling for emergencies, periodic payments built in for long-term treatment, and real recognition that a companion is sometimes not optional, child or adult. Chronic patients who have to travel abroad again and again deserve particular attention here. Every trip currently means starting from scratch: a new application, new paperwork, a new wait, a fresh financial hit. That’s cruel, and it’s needless. The state already knows these families’ situations. It should use that knowledge to make things easier, not force them to prove, every single time, that they still need help. A modern welfare system worth the name doesn’t wait for a family to collapse financially before it steps in. It sees the need coming and acts on it. In the end, you can tell everything about the quality of a state from three small scenes: a mother holding her child’s hand outside an operating theatre. A wife pacing outside a ward in a foreign country. A family, abroad, counting out what’s left of their money, just to stay by the person they love. Subscribe to our Newsletter Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world. Latest News The problem is policy, not a lack of trust EU states seek compromise on new taxes to fund next budget Cyprus records wettest August since 1901 as storms leave dead or missing at sea EU considers restrictions on second homes to tackle housing crisis Two arrested after Nicosia driver rams victims, flees scene Cyprus has EU’s lowest suicide rate, Eurostat says Overnight pharmacies on Wednesday, September 9