Education is like an enormous oceanic ship where no one can change the course quickly, even if everyone can see that they are heading for an iceberg. Enough politicians have been burned in Slovakia who have taken command, announced a new course, and started turning the steering wheel, but nothing happened to the ship.
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.
The term “wage” and its size are very important in national discussions about labor markets, taxes and insurance payments, but also part of international comparisons for investors deciding to build a factory or to place investments in a specific country. A lot of confusion has been created by the introduction of gross wage with arbitrary distinction between “employee paid” and “employer paid” taxes and contributions.
It makes a big difference whether the state directly funds the operation of restaurants or “merely” mandates the issuance of food stamps, or whether restaurants are funded by paying customers.
The current energy crisis is a huge lesson for the Green Deal. Ambitious goals, boldly planned in a period of cheap and available energy, are much more difficult and expensive to achieve in a period of scarcity and uncertainty.
The pandemic period has not been kind to some patients’ relationship with health professionals. A period of information uncertainty, spawning hoaxes. The patient with their own opinion and their own information falls under a crooked gaze.
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.
