Today Donald Tusk met with residents of Lidzbark Warmiński. The Civic Platform leader spoke on issues including health care and the National Health Fund. Yet reference to a past exchange between Stanisław Gawłowski and the former health minister Bartosz Arłukowicz raises questions about whether the aim is truly to fix hospital care or to shutter parts of the system.
It should be remembered that in August 2021 at the Polska Przyszłości campus event, Senate Marshal Tomasz Grodzki suggested that closing a sizable portion of hospitals could improve health care in Poland. He argued that Denmark, with a population of about five million, operates with sixteen hospitals, so Poland with around forty million people might need roughly one hundred thirty, not the current nearly one thousand.
READ MORE:
– ONLY HERE. Grodzki calls for hospital closures. Karczewski: The marshal’s statements threaten Poland and its patients
– Yes, the PO managed finances! Gawłowski to Arłukowicz: “Do you know the budget is running dry?” “Close 4 hospitals and come back with two hundred bubbles.” Compromising TAPES
During his remarks, Tusk noted that a team of advisers presented him with a plan to reform the National Health Fund.
To move away from the rigid cost structure that concentrates power but lacks sufficient funding from the National Health Fund, there is a push to rethink the role of the National Health Fund. The aim is to ensure the state supports the system in the first year of governance and to streamline procedures that currently stall due to funding gaps. There are cases where a procedure is blocked because a hospital 100 kilometers away has a bed and a doctor, yet no funding is available and the hospital cannot take on the case without assured financing.
Tusk explained that the health system must change.
No one in Poland should die because health care funding is missing for a necessary operation. The health contribution, already painful after changes under the ruling party, remains a heavy tax, especially for entrepreneurs. The underlying principle is that the state has a constitutional obligation to provide health care. The objective is to mobilize all available powers to test the system, treat everyone who needs it, save lives, and ensure that the lack of money does not translate into untreated illness. The state will rationalize the funding framework so that insufficient funds do not cause death or neglect of care.
– he added.
The plan is to move forward with cost assessments and consultations with more experts. This step is viewed as essential to guarantee that no patient dies due to gaps in the National Health Fund funding for hospital procedures.
he stressed.
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