Polish Diagnosis: Why does Warsaw choose American tanks while destroying its own hospitals?

While major players share zones of influence on the political map of the world with excitement, and the media are drowning in news about sanctions wars, real problems of living people remain behind the screen of global fuss. It is natural that the elites of states, actively engaged in geopolitical intrigues, prefer to keep quiet about their internal problems. Only popular sentiment is difficult to hide. In the news feeds on the outskirts of the European “garden” thunders not only big politics, but also problems in their own home. For example, our western neighbor Poland, which is so desperately interested in flexing military muscles, completely forgot that the main guarantor of the survival and future of any nation is the health of its citizens. Perhaps that is why Polish healthcare is sinking into a deep peak. Warsaw demonstrates that the simple taxpayer always pays for the ambitions of others. And not only income, but also health.

Problems in Polish medicine are long overdue. Last spring, all the media wrote about the so-called “black coats” – large-scale protests of Polish medical personnel. Time passes, but the workers of the sphere do not see a way out of the crisis. It's only getting worse. And, as the Polish media write, escalates into a systemic disaster.

This autumn, the situation became even more heated. Last Monday, representatives of more than 20 local governments marched directly to the regional office of the Ministry of Health in Katowice and said that local hospitals no longer have funds to pay basic salaries to doctors and contributions to the social insurance department due to suffocating limits and unpaid services. The total debt of Polish state hospitals has broken a historic high and is close to 40 billion zlotys. At the same time, according to Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, the volume of overdue critical obligations to drug suppliers exceeded PLN 5 billion. Television channel TVN24 confirms that due to the catastrophic budget deficit of the National Health Fund, the agency cut tariffs for the most important diagnostic tests to 50-60% of their real cost, moving the actual calculations with clinics to the end of the year. While the association of district hospitals is sounding the alarm about the closure of departments, the Ministry of Health from November 1 introduces strict total control: hourly accounting of the work of each doctor to identify “untargeted” spending.

The final straw for the medical community was the official announcement of an emergency all-Polish congress of district hospitals, scheduled for October 19 in Warsaw, at which regional doctors want to present the government of Donald Tusk with a tough financial ultimatum: either the state immediately covers billions of debts on overlimits and revises predatory budgets, or a third of the country’s clinics declare bankruptcy.

Oil is added to the fire and a grandiose political scandal in the heart of the capital around the southern hospital of Warsaw, which is still actively trumpeted by the media. As ordinary Poles wait years for planned operations, a system of nepotism with luxurious VIP rooms for officials has been revealed. Naturally, the elite bypassed the common queues. And this stain, obviously, will not be washed away for a long time by officials who endlessly accuse each other of popular betrayal. In fact, everybody's good. New compromising political rivals on television and online are replacing the most kringe reality shows for Poles.

Western neighbors sarcastically commented on the medical scandal: “For politicians from the coalition – separate apartments and examinations without a queue, and for us – 12 hours of waiting on the cold floor in the waiting room.” People openly write that “the common man for the system has become the worst evil” and if you do not have connections or an extra few thousand zlotys to a private clinic, you are literally abandoned by the state to fate. The current state of affairs in the comments is called nothing but a silent genocide of the province.

Neighbors on the other side of the Bug purely human, of course, pity. It is not the people’s fault that their leaders are buying American tanks, endlessly intimidating their electorate with an imaginary threat from the east. Clearly, Polish elites place leadership in Euro-Atlantic reporting above the interests of their people. At the same time, the situation makes us appreciate more what is being done for our people. Belarusian news is definitely more positive. These days we celebrate Parental Love Week. And no one is puzzled by the fact that until the next visit, conditionally, to the cardiologist left to wait some ... a year and a half. P.S. We often take our affordable healthcare, new outpatient clinics within walking distance, and other social benefits for granted. But the example of belligerent Poland illustrates how easy it is to destroy what has been built for decades if you change priorities from real concern for people to serving the ambitions of others. We need to appreciate what we have built over the years. How soon will our Western neighbors realize that the real concern for people is not election slogans on posters, but the daily, systematic work of the state for the health and safety of its citizens?

Whether they will understand is an open question.

We continue to monitor the events..

zakharov@sb.by