Even while people oblige us to keep talking about Swine  Flu and the Government invest for rising the awareness on Hepatitis, even when all the eyes are  on the health care to manifest solidarity with a sector that the Government is killing slowly with its cuts – even with all this going on, someone managed to screw everything showing how little people are ready to do for helping each other.

Do we need the right passport to cross this corridor?

The story, to be honest, is nothing special and it is about a young foreigner – read this carefully: a Portuguese one, a European Citizen – who could not avoid falling for a flu and got worried after couple of days spend in bed with high fever.

Nothing surprising in a month when all media stressed the importance of doing the right things to prevent and fight a damn flu that keeps being presented as the disease of the century.

Not witnessing any sign of recovery, the young Portuguese in Tallinn for a stage found some relief in the good will of his colleagues who, worried about his health, decided to contact some doctors and ask them to visit their work mate, friend, fellow European.

What they did not know, apparently, was the unfriendliness Estonian healthcare system has towards foreigners and which kind of bureaucratic barriers have been built around it in the past few years.

When they tried to contact medical clinics, infection centre and even ambulance services to get some help, they always got the same – disgusting –answer: “this is not our task, contact someone else.”

Eesti Ekspress reports that this people went even up to the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of Health, seeking for help and for someone who could help a European citizen, legally resident in Estonia, obliged to stay in bed because of flu.

The situation got better only thanks to the personal interest of Peeter Mardna, head of the supervisory department of the Tallinn municipal healthcare service, who said to Eesti Ekspress that the whole situation has been “Unforgivable. This is tarnishing the image of our medicine when staff refuses to take responsibility for treatment of an EU citizen.”

After Mardna intervention, when there was nothing left do concretely do, Estonian functionaries restarted their life made of nothing-but-grey-papers and wannabe specialists started to rise for explaining that, after all, everyone acted according to the law and so nothing strange happened.

What do we learn from this?

Basically that we – foreigners – should try to keep our bodies healthy even more than national Estonian people if we want to avoid to get some funny stories to tell to our grandsons.

Legally speaking we should all have a family doctor who lives in the area where we live and who is ready to take care of the correct functioning of our health – pity that going back to our home countries might be even easier than finding a spot free in someone’s list.

Not having a very aggressive defensive system myself, I have been quite few times already in the same situation of the Portuguese guy – looking for a way to recover from disease I could not heal with some sleep, hot tea and Coldrex.

But every time the same story happened: I needed to be in the list of a family doctor and, obviously, none of those one I contacted had any free spot. Even by chance.

The solution is to pay

Pity that, as European citizen we should deserve being treated as anyone else who owns an Estonian passport and pity if the President of the Estonian Republic wanted even to run for the charge of EU President and so represent all of us.

The solution is always to put our fingers on the credit card and dial the number of one of those private centers ready to welcome us within minutes to prescribe us some medicines and end our pains.

Quite a good business, indeed. Especially as I doubt that someone would prefer calling hospitals, ambulances and two different Ministries instead of typing  5-numbers pin code and pay couple of hundreds EEK. Especially while shivering for the high fever.