Will the president's signature unblock MZ?

The President had doubts related primarily, as explained by the head of the President's Office, to taking the process of transformation, merging hospitals and closing wards out of the control of central institutions (MZ, NFZ), and intends to keep a close eye on what effects his signature will have. And to intervene - with an appropriate draft amendment to the law - if necessary. It is rather unlikely to occur - not only because Minister Jolanta Sobieranska-Grenda also wants changes in the law. Above all, because no one - on the part of practitioners and experts - harbors hopes (or fears) that the law, affectionately known as the "caduceus" law, will trigger massive restructuring processes. On the contrary, its effects can be expected to be disproportionately small to the noise that accompanied the legislative process.

The real effect of Karol Nawrocki's decision may be, and should be, to unblock the Health Ministry and spur the ministry to (any) activity. Where we are, we know, while the question of where we are going has been difficult to answer since the end of July, and it is high time to change that. The problems, piled up in recent months - such as the frozen talks on changes to the minimum wage law - cannot be solved overnight, but neither can they be postponed indefinitely. They (and, above all, their consequences) will not disappear.

No one is assuming a legislative offensive by the health ministry at the first post-summer sessions of the Sejm in September (if only because the projects would first have to go the government's way), but what can be expected is for Minister Sobierańska-Grenda to meet with Health Committee deputies and answer some questions that will certainly be asked - primarily about the state of the health system's finances and the prospects for patients (and other stakeholders) arising from that state. To put it bluntly, the minister will probably be asked what there will be a shortage of money for at the end of 2025 and next year, and how the ministry intends to deal with it. Perhaps the conversation won't be about the "here and now," after all, as it is becoming increasingly clear how urgent it is to stabilize outlays for the healthy in the longer term than one or two years.

Of course, the challenges facing health care cannot be reduced to money: health education, the vaccination calendar for children and adolescents and the changes being prepared in it, the quality of medical staff training (concerns about medical specialties are sounding louder and louder), psychiatry - especially adult psychiatry - in which the changes introduced still have not exceeded critical mass and have not translated not only into systemic solutions, but above all into an effect in the form of real changes felt by patients. Questions can be multiplied, but first it is worth knowing the answer to the most fundamental ones. Which have been hanging in the air for some time now.