Rajmund Miller: We are leaving behind serious problems after our predecessors. This is an eight-year destruction of health care

Mr. 2023 is coming to an end - what kind of year was it for health care?

Like the previous years of our predecessors' terms of office, it was a very difficult year. It was a year that deepened the crisis in the health care system. It was a year in which we still had to try to rectify the mistakes that had been made in the past, even though we had no help in doing so from the Ministry and those in power. It was a year in which we suffered the consequences of the mistakes of the government and the Ministry of Health still from the COVID pandemic. Last year saw the highest number of deaths of Poles in the entire history of Poland after the war. That is 200,000 excess deaths.

We have a huge backlog. It's the queues to specialists that keep getting worse, it's the unsettled cases of people who can't receive timely oncological treatment. This has improved, but we are still at the tail end of the European Union countries when it comes to the availability of specifics that are effective in treating cancer.

After our predecessors, we are finding very serious problems indeed at the moment. They are also related to eight years of destruction of the health care system. We have more than 20 billion zlotys of debt for public hospitals. We have bad pricing of procedures, we have problems with the medical staff. We have problems today with salaries for nurses and support staff and other professional personnel. Today we are working on a law on salaries. This is all a legacy of the mindless activities of PiS.

During the covidu period, huge funds were moved out. It's 70 million zlotys for ventilators, which to this day has not been explained. It's 700 million zlotys for covid hospitals that have not been launched, that's the issue, that's the issue of money spent to buy masks. Examples can be multiplied, and the result is that today the Minister of Health and the Ministry of Health face a huge task. Let us also recall the unlawful actions of the previous Health Ministry authorities. With a last-minute amendment to the Law on the Medical and Dental Profession thrown in, 13 billion zlotys were taken from citizens' money spent on premiums, from the budget of the National Health Fund for activities whose costs should be borne by the government. This is, after all, unaccounted money from the Medical Fund, which was created for political purposes. It was first supposed to be used to treat children with cancer. It turns out that after all these years there is about 8 billion zlotys accumulated in this fund, in a situation where people can't wait for treatment.