The President of Georgia was personally observing the insurance policy distribution process at the Liberty Bank branch in Batumi today. Mikheil Saakashvili demanded order in terms of lines from the managers of the Bank and spoke to the pensioners about the importance of health insurance. According to him, over a million persons will be able to have diagnostic tests, ambulatory care and planned and emergency surgeries or other hospital services because of the insurance.

”One thing I promise all of the pensioners in Georgia is that starting today nobody will stand in lines in pension divisions. If we notice something like that one more time, we will transfer this project to another bank, which will administer the process in an orderly fashion while respecting people. This pension is a lot less today than you deserve. One, you deserve more. Two, you know that people over the age of 65 have a 140 GEL pension package this year, and it will reach 100 USD next year. We are now giving you a health insurance policy based on which, beginning on September 1^st every pensioner will have coverage on medical services and a large portion of medication costs. The hospitals we are building in Batumi, Keda, Chakvi, Khelvachauri are being built for our people. We are not opening them in order to score points. This is being done so that you don’t have any problems when you are ill. You know that we have a new government which I personally asked to sign an agreement about giving 1000 GEL vouchers to each family, and these families can use this for employment, social aid, child care or agriculture. Back in the day, that’s how we did it when I entered politics, and when I was running for office in Tbilisi. I don’t want to see such lines even by accident like today. I also know well what kind of poverty there is in Batumi. On one hand it makes us happy that there is a tourist boom here – people have new sources of income like hotels, people have been employed, products are being produced and sold, but on the other hand if a product costs 1 GEL in Tbilisi it costs 5-6 GEL here. What can people, who do not have hotels or apartments to rent out, do when the products are so expensive? This is why I promise you that we will take extraordinary measures in this direction too so that the pensioners and socially unprotected persons do not face such a problem. We have achieved that seasons do not fail anymore, and people are not oppressed” – stated the President of Georgia while talking to them.

Distribution of health insurance policies began today and they will become functional on September 1, 2012. The state will insure citizens in their pension age, persons with clearly expressed disabilities, and persons under the age of 18 with disabilities. Each one of them will receive a health insurance policy along with their pension at branches of Liberty Bank. Children up to 5 years of age and students will receive insurance policies in the mail at their permanent addresses.

At this point, up to 900 thousand persons are benefiting from state insurance and around 500 thousand from private insurance packages. Accordingly, by September 1, 2012 up to 2.4 million citizens of Georgia will be insured, which means half of the population of the country.