Poland’s development ministry is preparing to untether health insurance from employment status, thus extending medical access to those who are not registered as unemployed or receiving pensions.
Currently, insurance – which includes coverage of medical check-ups, surgeries, hospitalisation and refunds for prescription drugs via the National Health Fund (NFZ) – is mostly accessible through employment.
Registration is possible for those who are employed or self-employed or registered at social welfare and job centres, as well as via a family member until the age of 26 years. It is also possible to independently register by paying your own contributions.
According to Marek Woch, a health expert quoted by the Rzeczpospolita daily, in 2019 up to 4.5 million adult Poles were not covered. The changes now being prepared by the Ministry of Development, Labour and Technology would be a “real revolution in the approach to health insurance”, reports the newspaper.
The reform would also address the fact that many people register as unemployed in order to receive health insurance rather than genuinely seek jobs or training.
According to interviews at employment offices (PUP), 57% of applicants were only registering to be eligible for health insurance, a deputy development minister, Iwona Michałek, told Rzeczpospolita.
The new measures, if introduced, would mean that people who are not registered for health insurance through their employers, social welfare and job centres or their pension would also be able to register for free by applying directly to Poland’s Social Insurance Institution (ZUS).
The idea won praise from Monika Fedorczuk, an expert at the Lewiatan Confederation, an employers’ group. “Employment offices will stop having to deal with those who do not want their services and [it] will reduce administrative costs,” she told Rzeczpospolita.
However, according to the newspaper’s sources, it is possible that there will be a limit on how long those without employment will have access to medical insurance under the new system.
This would be “a very serious problem”, says Woch. It could in fact “mean an increase in the number of the uninsured without the right to free health care”, he told Rzeczpospolita.
In Woch’s opinion, “the approach to insurance should be completely changed and it should cover all Poles, regardless of whether they work full-time, are unemployed or use social welfare”.
The latest Eurostat data, from February 2021, show Poland having the EU’s lowest unemployment rate, of 3.1%, compared to 7.5% across the bloc as a whole. In the last quarter of 2020, Poland also recorded the highest year-on-year rise in employment rate – of 0.8 percentage points – among all member states.
Poland has the EU's lowest unemployment rate https://t.co/yhBWLSNtmn
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) April 7, 2021
Main image credit: Henryk Borawski/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 3.0)
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
