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Polish Health Care: Examination of Corruption

The purpose of this essay is to examine the phenomenon of corruption in the health-care system in Poland. The plan of the essay will be to set forth the social and political context in which Poland's current health-care system operates and then to discuss how corruption is operationalized, with a view toward identifying the scope of the problem of health-care corruption and forecasting possible lines of reform and development.

It is no secret that in the United States there is widespread dissatisfaction with the system of health-care delivery, which is perceived as expensive and subject to the bureaucratic discretion of payment officials who may have no medical expertise but a good deal of insurance authority. Some advocates call for a single-payer system of care similar in structure to the Medicare plan. Reference is not infrequently made to the "free"--that is, tax-funded--health care available in Europe.

But European health care is not uniform or uniformly available in all countries. In particular in the emerging post-Soviet states of Eastern Europe, the health care systems have an irregular structure. The irregularity is, indeed, the structure of corruption. That has been attributed to the fact that Poland remains a country in political, social, and economic transition out of the communist model to a capitalist or democratic-socialist model. Health care in Poland straddles the gap between capitalism and social democracy because its funding mechanisms are both public and private in nature. The public-sector structure of the health care system persists, but problems with it that were in evidence during the Soviet era were not automatically resolved when the Soviet style of service delivery was abandoned. Indeed, Poland's "public sector structure was unprepared for [the] rapid economic growth" that followed the collapse of the Soviet system. "Public finance still remained extremely centralized, the pension...

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Polish Health Care: Examination of Corruption. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:36, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2000178.html