Healthcare System Sexually Discriminates Children

28 February 2007

�Novi list� daily reports that the Croatian Health Insurance Bureau decided to allocate about 13 percent higher support for annual needs for medicines to boys up to seven years of age than to girls of the same age group. According to the Bureau, the decision was based on actual data on use of medicines for 2006, which shows that boys simply use more medicines than girls.

The Croatian Association of Preventive and Social Paediatrics and the Croatian Chamber of Medical Doctors opposed this decision. Dividing pre-school children on basis of their sex has no basis whatsoever, having in mind that there is no scientific data to prove that boys get more ill than girls or they need different types of healthcare. In addition, the Decision violates the provisions of the Convention on Rights of Children.

In spite of such warnings, the Health Insurance Bureau doesn�t intend to change the disputed provisions.

Although it is unlikely that the decision was based on some view that health of girls is less valuable than health of boys, it demonstrates how statistics, the allegedly objective criterion, can also be arbitrary.

There is no doubt that the data available to the Bureau is correct. However, the statistical data request is always preceded by selection of phenomenon that data should cover. If, by chance, somebody decided to monitor the use of medicines in children with blue and children with brown eyes, we could have had data that proves that brown-eyed children spend 25 more medicines than blue-eyed children, which would also be based on real statistical data.