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?
Since 2006, most of the time Slovakia has been ruled by politicians who have emphasized the role of the welfare state. The concept of pre-election welfare packages has become more popular and has become an integral part of mainstream politics, regardless of the phase of the election cycle.
On paper, Hungarian abortion policies are much like those of most EU countries: women can terminate their pregnancy on request up until the 12th week and can do so through state-funded institutions. Yet, in reality, the accessibility of abortion in Hungary is only a façade.
There are a number of ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We will use the example of photovoltaic subsidies in Slovakia to show how not to do it.
I dare to write that the health financing situation is becoming increasingly muddled. With all three health insurance companies (allegedly) starting to cut their losses, the problem of financing Slovak healthcare has moved up a notch. Of course, it is too early to be scared, but from a systemic point of view, any future financial problems of the health insurance companies would be much more serious than the financial problems of the hospitals.
In Slovakia, we have a problem with the drain of the brightest young people to foreign universities. If we want to solve this problem, we need to know the causes. And we can only know these if we understand how higher education works and what its real added value is.
If a quality secondary school can produce a quality graduate in 3 years instead of 4, it will save a quarter of its costs. That means it can cut the price by a quarter!
In recent weeks, a new disinformation narrative has become prevalent: sanctions against Russia are not working, Russia has become even stronger, and sanctions are essentially Europe’s economic suicide. This narrative is spread by pro-Kremlin disinformers.
The current social package worth more than a billion euro has definitively confirmed that Slovak government is going kamikaze in the area of public finances. After all, the money is “lying on the pavement”.
Of course, everyone would be delighted if the supermarkets were full of quality Slovak fruit, vegetables, meat, and other products. However, this ideal cannot be achieved by a policy of self-sufficiency, but by a policy of cooperation.
