February 15, 2019
The Majlis has given a huge vote of confidence to Saeed Namaki to be the new health minister—the first health minister not to be a physician.
His predecessor resigned over budget cuts and criticism of the allocation of state funds.
Born in Kashan, Namaki has a Ph.D. in pharmacy. He is a member of the faculty at Tehran’s Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences and has served as deputy head of the Planning and Budget Organization and also deputy chief of Iran’s Environmental Protection agency.
With only 25 negative votes and four abstentions, Namaki was voted into office with 229 supportive votes. His margin of support, 88.8 percent, was among the largest ever given any cabinet nominee in the Islamic Republic. Interestingly, it equaled the percentage of support his predecessor got in August 2017.
Namaki had been appointed as acting minister after Hassan Qazizadeh resigned December 3.
Qazizadeh’s resignation letter pointed at “inconsistencies and not delivering on promises” by the government’s Plan and Budget Organization, where Namaki was the Number Two.
The Rohani Administration and Qazizadeh had repeatedly been criticized for their allegedly costly plan to reform Iran’s healthcare system. But in his last speech as minister, Qazizadeh said the reform project had cost a fraction of what was spent bailing out failed credit institutions.
“The total money spent … is 164 trillion rials. [Yet they] spent 350 trillion rials on corrupt credit institutions,” he said.
Several unauthorized credit institutions, which mushroomed during President Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad’s tenure, collapsed after Rohani took office, with the Central Bank rushing to reimburse depositors who had lost their funds.
The health care reform plan aimed to reduce medical costs for patients and ease Iranians’ access to medical services.
Addressing the Majlis before the vote, Namaki vowed to carry on with the reforms and said that “no previous commitments will be ignored.”
