A statement of Health Minister of Ukraine Maksym Stepanov that the healthcare financing reform will be revised means de facto the denial of the reform, and there will not be the improvement of the situation in healthcare, ex-deputy health minister Pavlo Kovtonyuk has said.

"This is de facto the denial of the reform. They leave the National Health Service of Ukraine, but actually turn it into a transmitter of the subvention, return to financing on the principle of simply giving out money to everyone," he told Interfax-Ukraine.

Kovtonyuk said that the "revision of the reform" will not improve the situation in healthcare and will only lead to a reduction in the financing of clinics, which, thanks to better preparation and efforts, were able to increase their financing.

"The ministry will not receive negative messages, but those clinics that tried to do something, prepared, tried to work well and received more funding, now will receive less. We always have better ones who pay for populism, for paying to those who did not prepare and did not apply any effort," he said.

At the same time, Kovtonyuk said that there are mechanisms to cancel the reform, which can be applied if there is a consolidated political will. In particular, it will be necessary to amend the law on government financial guarantees (the law on healthcare reform) and the law on the national budget.

"It is a matter of price. It is a matter of effort. They will probably have to change the law for this, at least the budget law. But if there is already some kind of consolidated will to do this, I think that this will not stop them. With the previous two the ministers they didn't have such consolidation, the ministers did not take any obvious positions, therefore the reform continued. Now, I see that the minister has the support," Kovtonyuk said.

At the same time, he said that at present, the budget does not have the funds for the changes announced by Minister Stepanov, in particular, there are no funds to allocate an additional UAH 11 billion to increase the salaries for doctors.

"The authorities will hide behind the fact that now COVID-19, that we are spending additional resources, but it's not yet known where to get additional resources, and the finance minister does not know where to get UAH 11 billion, the minister does not know anything about this either, as I spoke to him, not to mention 6% of GDP," Kovtonyuk said.

The former deputy health minister believes that the decisions voiced by Stepanov "actually turn the National Health Service into a transmitter of subvention."

He also doubts that such changes will last until the autumn.

"You don't even need to be a finance minister to understand that in April our economy fell by 4%, that it will fall in May and will fall all summer. They would not have an additional UAH 11 billion, but they would remove something from healthcare at the end of the year to pay pensions. These are all reasons to cancel the reforms," he said.

"We can talk about the abolition of healthcare reform. In form, it will be the National Health Service, but in fact the National Health Service will be just to tell the IMF, donors, the World Bank that we have not killed the National Health Service and a kind of reform is going on. This is not the first government that thinks that the IMF is fools. In fact, we are returning to a subvention, because there is no other way that we went," the ex-deputy health minister said.