Voted by Romanian Senate: free access to healthcare for children without IDs
The bill that will provide free access to healthcare for children without IDs, initiated by Romanian MP Oana Bîzgan was submitted to the vote of the Senate on Monday, October 29, 2018. The senators voted unanimously in favor – 98 votes. The decisional vote will come from the General Assembly.
The aim this bill follows is to guarantee free access to healthcare services for children, a right that is stipulated both in the Romanian Constitution and in the national healthcare law. Also, the initiators want to reach most of the children that don’t have birth certificates or other identity documents, to ensure they have access to all the fundamental rights any citizen has, by including them in the national civil registry.
This bill will facilitate the identification process for people who do not have ID and who ”don’t legally exist”. Furthermore, the healthcare services providers will support the procedures for registering them, in order to give them the chance to basic level of human dignity. On the other side, having those kids and other vulnerable categories registered, the authorities will be able to monitor their health evolution and social inclusion.
”Our intention is to reduce as much as we can the number of children who don’t have birth certificates and social security numbers. Those kids are not guilty for their situation, the reasons that led to this situation being various. Moreover, the authorities did not offer the right support to fix those problems. This is why I considered important to bring this subject into my colleagues’ attention.” says Oana Bizgan, the MP who initiated the bill.
”The existing legislation provides free access to free health care services for all children under age of 18 – but that right can’t be actually exerted if they don’t have identity documents.” explains Roxana Minzatu, co-initiator of the bill.
Specifically, the bill guarantees the free access to health care for children and other people in vulnerable situations like persons with disabilities, those who suffers from affections that are regulated by the national health law, the women who are pregnant or just gave birth and the victims of human trafficking, even though they don’t have national IDs. This action comes to clear situations when persons from these categories benefited of health services that could not be settled by the National Health Insurance House because there was no legal basis for that.
In 2006, Romania had over 160 000 persons without IDs and over 10 000 of them never had a birth certificate and a social security number, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
This bill was signed by over 100 members of the Parliament from all political parties, and is one of the many bills initiated by Oana Bizgan that was cross-party supported.
Oana Bîzgan is a Romanian Member of Parliament and a Young Global Leader, member in the Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men and the Committee for Economic Policy, Reform and Privatization in the General Assembly. Oana Bîzgan already put forward a number of ambitious legislative initiatives such as the punishment of street harassment, psychological harassment at the workplace, civil partnership in Romanian law and a National Automated Register of sexual offenders and predators.