And while many are thinking a lot about where and with whom they will go for the New Year’s holidays, planning trips, patients in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, among whom are the most difficult – oncological ones, welcome another year with fear and uncertainty.
They don’t like celebrations and parties because they are fighting to survive, to stay with their children, parents, and spouses for another month.
Even in the year that is coming to an end, as in the previous ones, they fought with a serious disease, but also with the health system for one thing only – the right to timely, optimal treatment and therapy. Many in that fight, unfortunately, did not last!
The FBiH government is violating the law
Whether anyone will ever be held accountable for the lost lives of patients who died while waiting for prescribed therapy remains to be seen.
What is more important now is to try to save those who are still alive on the waiting lists. But what is the mood in the Federal Government, it seems that patients are still in for a big fight in 2026.
Why are cancer patients on waiting lists for prescribed therapies? The answer is because the Government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina does not comply with Article 82 of the Law on Health Insurance of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it adopted itself.
The federal government has been breaking the law for decades by not allocating as much money to the Solidarity Fund as is prescribed in the aforementioned article. The result is that the Government’s debt to the FBiH Health Insurance and Reinsurance Institute, which includes the Solidarity Fund, has risen to nearly two billion KM.
The federal auditors also warned about this a few months ago in their report on the execution of the budget for 2024.
As they stated in their report, when planning and approving funds for the financing of the Solidarity Fund, the Federal Government did not act in accordance with Article 82 of the Law on Health Insurance, because it approved 59,478,014 KM from the budget for 2024, while income from contributions for last year amounted to 223,211,183 marks.
Thus, more than 160 million KM were taken from patients last year alone.
In the current government in the FBiH, healthcare is in the last – eighth place under the item – miscellaneous. Therefore, the patients’ fear that in the next year they will be collecting money for medicine with the help of SMS messages and humanitarian organizations is justified.
They confirmed this to us in the “Renesansa” Association, which brings together breast and cervical cancer patients.
President Enida Glušac says that they are waiting for 2026 with fear and uncertainty, because all the promises made by the competent authorities in 2025 have not been fulfilled.
– The list of medicines of the Solidarity Fund has not yet been revised. The last time this was done was in 2019. We are waiting for when it will happen and along the way we are wondering who will see that moment in the first place. In the past year, the competent federal authorities made promises to us on several occasions, and even specified specific dates when it could happen, which they ultimately falsified. Patients have lost all hope – points out Glušac.
Haris Šabanović, representative of the SDA in the House of Representatives of the FBiH Parliament, says that it is a sad fact that the most difficult patients enter another year with uncertainty.
– We are talking about oncology patients, not about someone who has a rash, and that is a sad fact that this federal government has largely led us into. That they are too spendthrift, arrogant, careless about the budget and that there are no difficult patients in their priorities. Throughout my life, I have had a lot of contact with that group of patients and I know what they and their families are going through – says Šabanović.
He says that the Federal Government has had fun with the budget and how to spend it.
– They have already spent it well, they managed to create a deficit of one billion KM, but there are no patients in those plans – adds Šabanović.
According to him, citizens should put more pressure on the competent federal authorities so that the year 2026 does not become agony for the sick.
– I got the impression that this government, if there is no serious pressure from the public, pretends that this problem does not exist. They need online fiscalization in order for someone to win a tender worth many tens of millions of KM, and these are their priorities. Everything else disturbs them. Ours is to be the voice of the people, so that they see that this people has problems and that they have no right to treat the most vulnerable among us like that. I started the story about the budget two years ago because, as an economist, I noticed that it was being spent quite irresponsibly and arrogantly. After all, we are coming to a situation where we will patch up liquidity with new debts, and that is the worst possible scenario – not investments and projects – but liquidity. It’s a very bad path we’ve taken, and the more we go down it, the less space there will be for patients and all other citizens – emphasized Šabanović.
Will health care get the crumbs again?
Patients are anxiously awaiting the FBiH budget proposal and whether health care will once again receive crumbs.
The session of the House of Representatives was supposed to be held on December 29, but last week it was abruptly canceled until mid-January.
– The FBiH government, which should be the bearer of all important activities that reflect on the lives of citizens, is in complete disarray, without a strategy, with, as we could hear, new information about the planned borrowings. The session was cancelled, which means that there is no agreement on all the issues that are in the budget. This means that we enter the next year with complete uncertainty. If we look at the categories of citizens that the state is obliged to protect additionally, then it is much larger – says Alma Kratina, representative of the DF in the House of Representatives of the FBiH Parliament.
Associations of oncology patients in the past weeks also requested a thematic session in the House of Representatives on health, but it did not take place.
– Right at the beginning of the year, we will face numerous pressing problems in healthcare, such as waiting lists for oncology patients for therapy, the Solidarity Fund’s medication list that has not been changed since 2019, and a number of other things. Those who are obliged to solve it, starting with the Federal Ministry of Health, but also the Government in general, do not advertise. Deputies receive information about some secret sessions of the Government where enormous debts are planned. Until now, we have had non-transparent borrowing where there was no room for that money to be directed to where it is most needed. It’s hard to say, but the FBiH Government did not offer a solution for serious patients – concluded Kratina, reports Factor.
