In an effort to protect citizens from commercial healthcare, President Lech Kaczynski has called for a nation-wide referendum on the privatisation of the health sector in Poland.

Kaczynski said he intends to bring the issue to the Senate. He also wants to ask the government “to hold all bills regarding health care privatisation” until this matter can be resolved by referendum.

The president appealed to the government and opposition for a calm and substantive debate on the future of the health sector in Poland.

“A patient should not be a source of profit,” the president stated. Kaczynski believes that the bills prepared by the government reforming the Polish health care would lead to its privatisation, and as he stressed, the health sector is the last segment of society in which the rules of the free market should reign.

The request for a nation-wide referendum is made by the president upon the Senate’s consent. The consent must be expressed in an absolute majority of votes. Kaczynski’s party, Law and Justice, holds a minority of 38 seats to the 59 senators of the governing Civic Platform.

The issue of health care in Poland seems to be a yet another bone of contention – after foreign policy – in the difficult cohabitation between Lech Kaczynski and Donald Tusk since the Civic Platform won last autumn’s general election. (jm)