The parliamentary Finance and Budget Committee, chaired by MP Ibrahim Kanaan, discussed on Wednesday the follow-up to health-related topics in the budget for fiscal year 2024, such as hospitals, hospitalization and drugs for chronic and incurable diseases.
At the end of the meeting, Kanaan said that caretaker Health Minister Firas al-Abiad is committed to “providing coverage for hospitals based on their work and service to citizens in a way that guarantees equality and justice. This means that anything exceeding the threshold will be covered by the Ministry of Health according to specific standards and conditions. There are hospitals that provide services to citizens more than others, and they get what they need in terms of thresholds, while other hospitals are expected to provide services to the citizen at a better rate to benefit from them.”
Kanaan stressed that “the priority of the 2025 budget will have to be healthcare.”
“We will cooperate as the Finance Committee to get an acceptable budget that is better than that of 2024,” he said, revealing that “the tender for new drugs will start next week, after the Finance Committee transferred LBP 10,000 billion from the reserve to the Ministry of Health budget in the 2024 budget, which will, according to the mechanism, secure cancer drugs for 10 months.”
The 2024 budget allocated to hospitalization is $200 million, after exceeding $400 million in 2019.
