Martin Vlachynsky

The answer is Solomonic – we should be asking a different question. Most people have a correct, rough idea that healthcare is not free and that someone, somewhere, somehow pays for it. Some people are even aware of health insurance contributions, and the most knowledgeable among them even know how much these contributions are in relation to their salary.

Slovakia’s response to the tariff threat? The Prime Minister and the Minister of Economy have begun saying they want to redirect EU funds to help companies affected by US tariffs. We do not yet know exactly what this crisis will look like—but we already know the solution: European money. Journalists are asking us whether this is a good or a bad decision. You might be surprised, but I do not have an answer.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to bring health services closer to consumers is to extend the ability to sell selected over-the-counter (OTC) medications in retail outlets while expanding the competencies of pharmacies. In terms of the openness of OTC medication sales, there are no uniform rules across Europe. About half of European countries allow OTC medicines to be sold outside pharmacies under various conditions.

The illusory truth effect is a psychological phenomenon describing the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. One example I can think of in Slovakia is the statement about \"cherry-picking\" in the hospital sector. Lower-tier hospitals cherry-pick the easy and profitable patients and send the rest to the larger state hospitals, which then make economic losses on them.

I often hear the phrases \'real price\' or \'justified price\', for example, in the question of ambulances or hospitals. They make my economic hair stand on end. It reminds me of how deeply embedded healthcare is in the price thinking of planned economics. Before 1989 in Slovakia, the whole economy was run on the principle of price. A manager in a company calculated the price of steel, plastic, and man-hours to produce one Škoda 120 car, for example.

Yes, this comment is about European regulations. It started with curved cucumbers and today not a day goes by that I do not send a few swear words in the direction of the Belgian capital over some minor but all the more annoying interference in my life. Somewhere high above, noble intentions such as privacy, space for competitors, or less waste are floating around, but at the end of the day, Kafkaesque bizarreness falls out of it.

Recently, a Slovakian newspaper published a commentary about tighter regulation in the healthcare sector. The question remains what exactly does he mean by the word \"tighter regulation\"?

Do you also feel that communication is somehow getting faster and easier for us before national election? Statuses, clickbait headlines, short Tik-Tok videos, captions on Instagram photos. If you do not condense the information into three words, do not even bother saying anything. Okay, maybe my age and nostalgia are writing this out of me and it has always been this way, just by analog means. But what I see, even without nostalgia, is the decline of electoral agendas.

Recently publicized case of a child who was not reimbursed by his health insurance company for a requested medicine illustrates the broken world of medicine. Lots of regulations  and little market is supposed to protect patients, but it often works exactly the opposite. A three-year-old boy from Slovakia suffers from Dravet syndrome, a severe form of congenital epilepsy characterized by dozens of seizures each day.

Public healthcare should also work with priorities. What has more priority? Financial or geographical accessibility? Quality or quantity? What should be clearly free and, conversely, what is the Slovak patient-insured-consumer willing to pay for?