“For fuck’s sake do we need a balanced budget if we would not survive?” Stepanov described his conversation with the Minister of Finance

Maksym Stepanov, the Minister of Healthcare, said that he was constantly in communication with the Minister of Finance Serhii Marchenko over the topic of the state budget. The head of the Ministry of Healthcare reported it to pediatrician Yevgeny Komarovsky during an interview for Komarovsky’s YouTube channel. 

According to Stepanov he and Marchenko is in “a tough professional resistance” with Marchenko on the issues of financing of medical care system.

“He needs a balanced budget , and I need survival. He aims, I think, to make this balanced budget. I say “ Serhii, for fuck’s sake do we need a balanced budget if we simply would not survive?” – explained the Minister of Healthcare. 

He remarked that he offered the Minister of Finance to imagine that after waking up on January 1 they discover that “we are on the brink of some new virus” and the country is facing new epidemic on top of coronavirus. 

On November 26, Marchenko announced that since Ukraine failed to receive planned trenches from International Monetary Fund within the stand-by program, the state budget faced a lack of three bln dollars by the end of the year. 

The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine refused to propose increased salaries for medical professionals in the 2021 state budget. 

Stepanov talks about necessity of increasing the payments to medics in his every press briefing. 

Coronavirus disease outbreak started in China in later 2019. On March 11, 2020, World Health Organization declared it pandemic.

As of December 12 in Ukraine there were 885 039 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 12 811 of them were registered in the previous 24 hours. 14 998 people had died of COVID-19, 494 001 persons had recovered.