Missing Arm and Leg, They Claim I Am Not Invalid

22 years ago Anto Anusic was burnt on a transmission line. Someone forgot to stamp his papers, not healthcare claims he is not an invalid.

Anto Anusic, a 53 year old HEP (Croatian Electric Industry) worker from Cerne, cannot understand what is happening in the world around him. More precisely, he considers that no normal people work in Croatian healthcare (HZZO), with reason.

22 years ago he was literally burned whist on an electricity transmission line, after which his left arm and leg were amputated. As a work invalid he was rehabilitated, and managed to return to work in HEP, he received medication, prosthesis… Last year the HZZO (Croatian Institute for Health Insurance) brought a decision which suddenly denies his status as a work invalid. The reason is that back then, in the SIZ healthcare company at the time, nobody put a stamp on paper that his company used to report his injury at work, which nobody noticed back then.

Procedure cannot be repeated due to time limitations

The lack of a stamp on the paper was noticed after January 1, 2008 when the HZZO office for protecting health at work was founded. The office claims that Anusic is not an invalid because his injury ‘is not recognized in the prescribed procedure’. This decision refused to co-finance the cost of his rehabilitation at the hot springs as a work invalid.

In the document they gave him, they wrote that they cannot subsequently determine that he is a work invalid because a the time limitation has passed. He can try to protect his rights at the management court.

The fact that he has a heap of documentation issued to him as a work invalid does not help in his credibility as to being a work invalid. For example, on October 18, 1990, the SIZ healthcare office wrote that ‘due to an injury at work he should be relocated to another work position where he is not needed in the field, needed to stand or walk all the time, or the use of both hands”.

Nobody asks living witnesses

Wanting his absurd story to be heard, he told us that he feels very abused by the bureaucracy which claims he is not an invalid, and he says that anyone who was born in Cerne before his accident can testify to that.

Zlatko Matec and Ivica Perisic are also alive, who went to repair the fault on the transmission line on June 20, 1987. They remember Anusic grabbing the electrified wire.

“Twenty years later I went to my doctor in my village, and nobody ever told me that I do not have the right to go to the hot springs or some aid as a work invalid. They did not stimulate me, I pushed myself to go back to work, because I wanted to be amongst people, and not to sit at home in depression. I started to work in 1992, because they could not find an adequate work position for me. I did not use any special benefits as a work invalid. It turns out that I have been punished for not being on sick leave for longer than 30 days in 17 years, that I did not go before a commission where somebody would have probably warned me that my papers are missing a stamp. I have achieved my right to rehabilitation and aids like any sort of invalid, regardless of if I fell from a pear tree of was in a traffic accident. However, I want to legally clear up my situation because as a work invalid I have the right to a 100 percent bonus to sick leave as a consequence of an accident. I also have the right to three months a year of benefit work records for retirement, and because they change the laws and people’s rights all the time, who knows if that status will be of more material importance in a few years time. In the end there is a question of principle, my life cannot be fashioned by the fact that some administrative worker forgot to put a stamp on my papers. Now something has become a problem which is easily solvable” says Anto Anusic.

Rehabilitated and working, not an invalid?

At the time of the accident he was a young man, the father of two children. The family expanded and Anto is the only one working. Now his only daughter is studying in Zagreb, and regardless of the series accident that occurred to him, this man is not crying for his life. He swears that he will find an end to this bureaucratic story, just like with everything else.

“What is happening to me is terrible. I was especially hit when one of their legal experts started to explain that I am not an invalid anymore because the papers show that I am rehabilitated and working again. I have to explain to him ‘Sir, an amputation of an arm and leg is not a disease that you can recover from, but a lasting shortcoming!’ Unfortunately I am not the only one. There are a few thousand invalids in Croatia who are having trouble because of someone else’s lack of work. But I am very persistent and I will push through, if needed to Strasbourg, I am only afraid that I will be very, very old be then.