INTERVIEW-Radical medicine as Georgia orders hospital sell-off
18 Jan 2007 14:12:56 GMT Source: Reuters
By Niko Mchedlishvili TBILISI, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Ex-Soviet Georgia is to sell off all the country's hospitals as part of a radical programme to turn around the economy after years of misrule, the economic reform minister told Reuters on Thursday. Kakha Bendukidze said the hospital buildings -- many of which are decaying but located on prime real estate -- will be handed to private investors who in exchange will build, equip and operate new hospitals on less valuable sites. Bendukidze was an industrialist in Russia whose ultra-liberal privatisation drive has been condemned by opponents as a betrayal of national interests but applauded by international financial institutions. "Within two to three years we will have renewed, modern, private infrastructure in the health service. Now nobody is happy with the situation in this sphere, neither patients nor doctors, nor politicians, nobody. We expect to attract no less than $200 millions of investments," Bendukidze said. "We have to approach this issue as Americans do -- the healthcare service and hospitals are profitable businesses, and they should be managed by private firms," Bendukidze said. He did not indicate which investors would be targeted. Bendukidze was hired to join the Georgian government after the 2003 "Rose Revolution" when liberal reformers mounted weeks of street protests and forced veteran leader Eduard Shevardnadze to resign. One of the protest leaders, U.S.-trained lawyer Mikhail Saakashvili is now Georgia's president. Bendukidze has handed over to private investors ports, government buildings and energy infra-structure to try to fill state coffers and stimulate private investment. The Georgian economy has had to weather a trade embargo imposed by Russia at the end of 2006 and a more than two-fold increase in the price of Russian natural gas. Despite that, the government reported GDP growth in 2006 of 10 percent and forecast 7.5 percent growth in 2007. "We live in a country on which the main trading partner, Russia, imposed a blockade, but we survived, and I talk about this because I rely on the main figure, GDP growth, (and) that is continuing," Bendukidze said. "I'm sure that 2007 will become a turning point, because we showed the world that a country on which a blockade was imposed continues to grow at the same rate," Bendukidze said.
