Just what the doctor ordered
The city of Łódź seems to have the most inventive and enterprising doctors in the whole country. Not satisfied with the sight of doctors in the ambulance service combining medicine with the undertaking business, the Łódź Chamber of Physicians has come up with a legislative plan to revolutionise the country's ailing health service.
The Łódź doctors are proposing that the so-called "presents for services rendered," tendered by grateful patients in the form of cash for doctors and surgeons, should be made legal. They would all be registered and taxed. The good doctors would share the proceeds with the hospitals that employ them. How kind of them to remember that it is the public hospitals which provide them with the infrastructure for their extracurricular activities.
I suppose the barefaced cheek of proposing to legalise bribery should surprise no-one around here. After all, since institutions such as the National TV and Radio Commission are actually embedded in the constitution, all professional groups have a right to feel that the right to a bribe is enshrined in the principles of law.
Indeed we can go further. Why should this kind of creative thinking be limited only to doctors? Teachers could also take money as thanks for "good grades" and register the amounts given. That's one way of stopping them protesting against increasing their hours for no extra pay.
This could also be an answer to transparency in the funding of election campaigns. Politicians could simply declare all the presents they take and share the commissions on doing deals with the beleaguered exchequer.
One group of professionals who have not so far joined in that kind of creative spirit are the police. My mother-in-law went to a meeting organised on her estate to discuss rising crime with the local constabulary. Two young uniformed men came and whinged for over an hour about how little pay they got, how much paperwork they had to do, how they could not afford to buy a flat and about how ill their grandmas or pets were. If they had taken the Łódź doctors example, they would have asked the troubled residents up-front for payment so that they get off their backsides and do their jobs of freeing the estate from thugs and drug pushers.
I wonder what we could invent to make the public prosecutors do their jobs. During the investigation into the assassination of the former chief of police, the prime suspect was released to travel abroad freely and evidence from the crime scene was not secured by forensics. In the Rywin investigation, the prosecutors have been shy of checking the billing on the phones of those mixed up in the affair and have not searched the house of the accused. Maybe the impoverished prosecutors are awaiting a legislative proposal to give them a percentage of the money which changes hands in criminal transactions.
The Łódź doctors castigated by the national press and the electronic media have withdrawn their enterprising legislative proposal. They now feel the time is not right to take it any further. Indeed, many more patients must die as a result of collapsing health services and medical negligence before anyone will give a damn. The Łódź doctors are counting on the patients themselves, in sheer desperation at their plights, asking for such a measure.
Instead of dreaming up any more crackpot schemes, would it not be better to start afresh? Admit that the Łapinski-inspired Central Health Fund is a waste of time and introduce a real insurance scheme where insurers can compete with each other, giving patients genuine choice. The mirage of standard uniform provision across the country is not worth chasing. It has never worked anywhere because equality of provision will never be attained. Instead of levelling down, it is better to level up by allowing competition and choice. The same is true of education, where vouchers should be tried in order to break the stranglehold that the teaching unions have on the schools' service.
This option is not available when it comes to law enforcement and the justice system. Here the answers lie in making the prosecution service independent of the government, making the police accountable to local authorities and conducting ruthless scrutiny of the private finances of both prosecutors and judges. Becoming a judge should come as the culmination of a distinguished legal career and not as a punishment for having failed to get into a successful law firm.
The measures I have outlined, of course, are much less likely to be implemented than the Łódź doctors' bill or NASA getting funding from martians. They are totally unattractive to all the control freaks who dominate politics. Our governments want full control of the health, education and justice systems. It is only by having control that they can continue to make people dependent on them for their favours. That's always more important than people's health or safety.
After the decision of the SLD-dominated Investigative Committee into the Rywin Affair, to avoid probing into visits and calls made by senior government and public media figures, we know that transparency of public life in this country is a joke. We are to know only what we are told and what is good for us. What price for the truth when everything is for sale?
The Łódź doctors are proposing that the so-called "presents for services rendered," tendered by grateful patients in the form of cash for doctors and surgeons, should be made legal. They would all be registered and taxed. The good doctors would share the proceeds with the hospitals that employ them. How kind of them to remember that it is the public hospitals which provide them with the infrastructure for their extracurricular activities.
I suppose the barefaced cheek of proposing to legalise bribery should surprise no-one around here. After all, since institutions such as the National TV and Radio Commission are actually embedded in the constitution, all professional groups have a right to feel that the right to a bribe is enshrined in the principles of law.
Indeed we can go further. Why should this kind of creative thinking be limited only to doctors? Teachers could also take money as thanks for "good grades" and register the amounts given. That's one way of stopping them protesting against increasing their hours for no extra pay.
This could also be an answer to transparency in the funding of election campaigns. Politicians could simply declare all the presents they take and share the commissions on doing deals with the beleaguered exchequer.
One group of professionals who have not so far joined in that kind of creative spirit are the police. My mother-in-law went to a meeting organised on her estate to discuss rising crime with the local constabulary. Two young uniformed men came and whinged for over an hour about how little pay they got, how much paperwork they had to do, how they could not afford to buy a flat and about how ill their grandmas or pets were. If they had taken the Łódź doctors example, they would have asked the troubled residents up-front for payment so that they get off their backsides and do their jobs of freeing the estate from thugs and drug pushers.
I wonder what we could invent to make the public prosecutors do their jobs. During the investigation into the assassination of the former chief of police, the prime suspect was released to travel abroad freely and evidence from the crime scene was not secured by forensics. In the Rywin investigation, the prosecutors have been shy of checking the billing on the phones of those mixed up in the affair and have not searched the house of the accused. Maybe the impoverished prosecutors are awaiting a legislative proposal to give them a percentage of the money which changes hands in criminal transactions.
The Łódź doctors castigated by the national press and the electronic media have withdrawn their enterprising legislative proposal. They now feel the time is not right to take it any further. Indeed, many more patients must die as a result of collapsing health services and medical negligence before anyone will give a damn. The Łódź doctors are counting on the patients themselves, in sheer desperation at their plights, asking for such a measure.
Instead of dreaming up any more crackpot schemes, would it not be better to start afresh? Admit that the Łapinski-inspired Central Health Fund is a waste of time and introduce a real insurance scheme where insurers can compete with each other, giving patients genuine choice. The mirage of standard uniform provision across the country is not worth chasing. It has never worked anywhere because equality of provision will never be attained. Instead of levelling down, it is better to level up by allowing competition and choice. The same is true of education, where vouchers should be tried in order to break the stranglehold that the teaching unions have on the schools' service.
This option is not available when it comes to law enforcement and the justice system. Here the answers lie in making the prosecution service independent of the government, making the police accountable to local authorities and conducting ruthless scrutiny of the private finances of both prosecutors and judges. Becoming a judge should come as the culmination of a distinguished legal career and not as a punishment for having failed to get into a successful law firm.
The measures I have outlined, of course, are much less likely to be implemented than the Łódź doctors' bill or NASA getting funding from martians. They are totally unattractive to all the control freaks who dominate politics. Our governments want full control of the health, education and justice systems. It is only by having control that they can continue to make people dependent on them for their favours. That's always more important than people's health or safety.
After the decision of the SLD-dominated Investigative Committee into the Rywin Affair, to avoid probing into visits and calls made by senior government and public media figures, we know that transparency of public life in this country is a joke. We are to know only what we are told and what is good for us. What price for the truth when everything is for sale?
