Buy a medical business in Poland
22.01.2023
The world has long been debating whether it is the duty of the state to provide health insurance to private individuals.
Opponents of this approach consider this type of insurance the exclusive prerogative of private insurance corporations or, possibly, non-profit organizations.
On the other hand, supporters of state provision in the field of medicine argue that health care is a sector that is almost impossible to regulate solely through market mechanisms.
We will try to understand how right one or the other is on the example of the health care system of the Republic of Poland, based on the model of insurance medicine.
According to Article 68 of the Constitution, all citizens of Poland have equal access to health care paid for by the state.
At the same time, the source of financing for such assistance is the National Health Fund, which is filled with insurance premiums of citizens in the amount of 9% of their income.
This does not apply to narrow-profile medical services such as ambulance, the costs of which are fully covered from the state budget.
However, despite the presence of a health care fund and protected budget items, Polish medicine has been experiencing systemic funding difficulties for many years.
Public spending on health care in the Republic of Poland remains one of the lowest among the countries of the European Union.
For example, according to the Eurostat agency, in 2017 the state spent only 4.7% of GDP on healthcare, while the average spending in the EU countries was 7%.
Such numbers negatively affect patient safety and lead to systemic problems in the public sector of medicine, which in turn contributes to:
• reducing the availability of inpatient treatment;
• increase in queues and waiting times;
• lowering the quality of medical services and reducing their range;
• an increase in the number of complications and deaths.
The chronic underfunding of the industry leads to a decrease in wages and a drop in the prestige of the medical profession and, as a result of these problems, to a mass exodus of qualified medical personnel abroad.
The shortage of doctors of certain specialties due to existing restrictions on admission to specialized universities can also be attributed to the personnel problems of the Polish health care system. This has led to the fact that there are only 2.2 doctors per 1,000 people. While in the EU this indicator is at the level of 3.4.
Thus, the health care model in Poland needs to be reorganized and abandoned old and inefficient approaches to managing the industry.
The development of an excessive network of small non-competitive hospitals should be completely abandoned, and the organizational and legal form of medical institutions should be reviewed.
