The President of Georgia visited the Beridze family in Batumi today and expressed concern for their problems. The family is socially unprotected, however this status was revoked because one of the members of family – a 10 year old Giorgi, who is suffering from Aplastic Anemia was taken to Italy to get medical care with the help of his relatives. After returning to Georgia, the adolescent could not enroll in any healthcare program; they took away his state insurance despite the fact that none of his family members are employed. The President arrived at the Beridze family with the Head of the Social Provision Agency and expressed interest in the reasons for which their status had been revoked. As Mikheil Saakashvili noted, this family’s status of a socially unprotected family definitely has to be revisited. According to the President, no person should have a feeling of injustice and insecurity because of such a misunderstanding. Mikheil Saakashvili also spoke about the importance of a more complete and flexible system.
“Of course we want to help people more than we are, but the most important thing is to distribute this help fairly. You have an everyday interaction with these people. That is why you need to provide so that such families are not oppressed unfairly. In this case I am seeing the unfairness with my own yes – whatever happened here cannot be referred to as anything else. We are not an oil or gas country and we don’t have a lot of money, but whatever we have is coming from taxes and it has to be distributed fairly. The worst thing that can happen is an unfair distribution of this money. That is why I ask you to write all of these recommendations and create a more complete and flexible system” – noted the President of Georgia.
Additionally, the President made a statement at the Beridze family about the fact that the population will be provided with energy vouchers. Because of severe weather conditions the population experienced a 20-30 % increase in the energy consumption bills. The President ordered the representatives of government to distribute energy vouchers in order to fill the payment gap created by the increased consumption due to severe weather conditions.