"However, the epidemic then arrives and pulls many of them down. It then becomes apparent that the quality of public services is a measure of a state's civilizational level. My book is about how PiS's policies have some justification, but they don't truly solve all problems. Instead, they create new problems that no one currently wants or knows how to recognize," says Łukasz Pawłowski from Kultura Liberalna to Piotr Witwicki in the weekend edition of Rzeczpospolita's Plus Minus. 300POLITYKA publishes an excerpt from the book: "The Second Wave of Privatization" – which is available as an e-book on the Publio service. *****

I am convinced that what we currently perceive as PiS's greatest strength – large social expenditures in the form of direct transfers – is also the party's greatest weakness.

[...]

Cash transfers – if they are not accompanied by the development of efficiently functioning and universally accessible public services – will not help the most disadvantaged. Nor will they equalize opportunities. Why? Because if cash transfers are introduced at the cost of neglecting public services such as education and healthcare, they can have the exact opposite effect of what is intended – instead of reducing inequality, they will increase it. In this book, I argue that this is precisely the situation we are currently facing in Poland, and I call this phenomenon the "second wave of privatization."

Unlike the first wave – which referred to the privatization of large, mostly unprofitable enterprises inherited from the previous regime in the 1990s – the second wave concerns our private lives. It roughly entails that, witnessing the collapse of many areas of state functioning, including healthcare and education, wealthy individuals will begin to massively use private educational or healthcare services.

Poorer Poles will be forced to use the underfunded public sector and/or regularly pay extra for private services. However, while for wealthy people, the additional payment will not be a significant problem for their household budget, for the poorer – despite the 500 plus program – any such expense will be a considerable burden.

This also has the negative consequence, which the PiS program itself calls "privatization of state functions," and which involves commissioning tasks that should be performed by state bodies to private companies.

However, the creators of the Law and Justice program claim that such a phenomenon occurred during the PO-PSL governments, when security companies allegedly took over police functions, and offices commissioned private companies to perform their duties. Unfortunately, they do not specify when these pathologies occurred, where, or what their scale was. The irony is that exactly the same phenomenon is occurring under the PiS government. The difference being that it is happening in far more significant areas, including education, healthcare, and the pension system. There is evidence for this in the form of hard data. The Central Statistical Office reports that in 2017, private healthcare expenditures amounted to almost 39.7 billion PLN. The previous year, it was only 36.5 billion PLN, meaning it increased by 8.7 percent year-on-year. Another indicator confirming this trend is the rapid increase in medical service prices. In May, it turned out that they had increased by 5.1 percent year-on-year. According to economist Ignacy Morawski, this is the fastest growth in this decade and almost the fastest in this century. It is not surprising that prices are rising when demand is growing very rapidly, and supply – measured by the number of doctors – is small and limited in our country. How do we know that demand is growing? From data from the Polish Insurance Association, for instance. Comparing data from the first and second halves of 2018 and 2019, the Association reported that expenditures on private health insurance increased by 12 percent to 430 million PLN. On October 9, 2019, the newspaper "Rzeczpospolita" reported this on its front page. The article, with the unambiguous title "We Treat Ourselves Privately," also states that "the collapse of public healthcare is driving customers to private facilities and insurers," and "as of the end of June, over 2.7 million people used private health insurance," which is as much as 20 percent more than 12 months earlier!

These are, of course, not the only data showing how the crisis in public healthcare – which dramatically intensified between 2015 and 2019 – combined with the social transfer policy, affects the behavior of Poles. I write more about this phenomenon on later pages of the book. Similarly, I discuss the crisis in the public education system, which is causing analogous effects. At this point, it may be worthwhile to cite a few pieces of data showing how serious a phenomenon we are dealing with in schools as well. As analyses by the Public Opinion Research Center conducted for the Stefan Batory Foundation show, as many as 34.26 percent of Polish families with school-aged children use private tutoring. The dynamic development of the tutoring market (often operating in the grey economy) has been heard about in Poland for a long time. As early as 2016, the then Minister of Education, Anna Zalewska, estimated its value at 4 billion PLN, while announcing a fight against what she called the "plague of tutoring." The data cited above show that the minister's efforts – if they actually existed – yielded no results.

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As the aforementioned poll for the Batorego Foundation shows, parents sending their children for additional classes spend an average of 420 PLN per month on them, which is almost equivalent to the amount received per child under the 500 plus program. This is, among other things, why the percentage of parents hiring additional tutors differs significantly depending on education, and consequently, income level. Among individuals with higher education, almost half of parents send their children for private lessons, while in the case of individuals with primary education – only 20 percent. As the author of the research report, Paweł Marczewski, rightly noted, "considering that the level of cultural capital in families with primary education is lower, this significant disproportion in spending on additional educational support for children further exacerbates the already very large inequalities in life chances for children from families with different levels of parental education."

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The form of citizen support chosen by PiS (cash transfers granted to everyone regardless of income), combined with the progressive neglect in access to public services (including education and healthcare), yields effects almost exactly opposite to the intended ones. Public services, which any pro-socially oriented government should prioritize, are not only faltering but are being displaced by private services, whose prices have rapidly increased. Needy people pay for them – at least in part – with funds received from the state through cash transfers.

This state of affairs, contrary to the assurances of the ruling party, does not combat inequality but shifts it to another level. Those who can afford private transportation, healthcare, or education continue to pay for them. Those who previously could not afford such services are starting to pay because the public system, instead of functioning better and better, is sinking into increasing chaos. The concept of solidarity has been at the foundation of the image built by Law and Justice for years. Yet, the actions actually taken by the party are producing paradoxical results – instead of building solidarity, they are leading to social atomization. PiS thus appears to be doing exactly what it has accused its political opponents of for years.

Łukasz Pawłowski

member of the editorial team of "Kultura Liberalna." Sociologist and psychologist by education, doctor of sociology. Twitter: @lukpawlowski.