“As long as I am president, privatisation of the health service is out of the question,” said President Andrzej Duda today at a press conference alongside the health minister ahead of presidential elections scheduled for next week. He also noted the opposition have previously sought greater private provision of healthcare.
The current coronavirus crisis has emphasised even further “how important public healthcare is,” said Duda. “We must do everything to ensure that it remains.”
The president thanked medical staff for their work in tackling the epidemic. “It’s hard to say where we would be if it wasn’t for their devotion and heroism,” he said.
The president also made clear that his remarks related to the current presidential election campaign, in which he is standing for reelection in a vote that is due to take place next Sunday (though doubts remain over how and even when the election will take place amid the lockdown).
“When today we are in the middle of an election campaign…I undertake that, in my second term as president, I will not sign any law that would allow the privatisation of public hospitals,” pledged Duda, who publicly signed a declaration to that effect.
The president praised public healthcare for allowing “every citizen [to be] treated equally”. He added that those who favour commercialisation are promoting “dangerous ideas…which could result in difficult access to treatment, especially for the less wealthy and those outside large urban areas”.
While the Polish constitution states that everyone has the right to free health care, in practice coverage is not universal. Many workers are not covered by the public health insurance system due to their “junk contracts”, which do not oblige employers to pay a worker’s social insurance.
Poland also has one of the lowest levels of public health spending in the European Union, with Poles spending almost 10 billion zloty a year on private treatment. Private financing, mostly from out-of-pocket expenses, accounts for 30% of spending on health in Poland, a much higher level than in most EU member states.
Duda emphasised that he is not opposed to private healthcare providers operating alongside the public system. But he stressed that the latter should not be “transformed” into the former.
The president criticised the main opposition’s track-record in this regard. He said that under Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform-led government of 2007-15, “ideas to commercialise and privatise healthcare were very strong”. But they were resisted by then-president Lech Kaczyński, said Duda, who was an official in the presidential chancellery at the time.
In 2016, the newly elected PiS government had already been vocal about halting the planned privatisation of the public health system, and moving towards a model more like the UK’s National Health Service.
During the current epidemic, healthcare institutions have become hot spots for the spread of the coronavirus. There have been major outbreaks in hospitals and cares homes. Medical staff make up around one sixth of all those infected in Poland.
Some doctors, speaking anonymously due to a ban on public statements, have pointed to a lack of equipment and poor procedures as being responsible for the spread of the virus in healthcare facilities.
Main image credit: Jakub Szymczuk/KPRP
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
