Is this the worst clusterfuck in Finnish politics?
Let's take a look at one of the biggest clusterfucks in Finnish political history: The sote-reform.
Since a lot of my visitors here are foreigners, I'll have to do some explaining first. Sote, is an abbreviation used when talking about heath and social services. It's currently being thrown around a lot because of an effort to reform these fields, in order to combat increasing costs, which puts a lot of pressure on the system. Probably the main reason for this is the aging population, a problem facing large parts of the western world. Because of this, in order to guarantee the same services in the future, plans were devised to curb some of the increasing costs, mainly by simplifying the administration. You see, currently these fields are being controlled on the municipal level. Since individual municipalities are allowed these things themselves, this means there are multiple different ways to handle this, which makes the current system hideously complicated. The main idea has been to take administration away from the municipalities and instead have some larger entity to take control. The plans call for forming larger zones, which would handle everything from healthcare, social security and in some cases unemployment services. This is supposed to simplify and cut cost from administration while still guaranteeing access to the same services for everybody as before. Experts have said that in order to optimize the effects, the number of these zones should be between 5 and 8, and that any model where the number would go above 12 simply wouldn't have the effects hoped for. Unfortunately, our current government hasn't done too well when it comes to listening to experts.
We have to look at what the parties forming the government stand for. Now, in a previous post I took a look at the governmental crisis we had last summer, but in that I didn't go into detail about the actual policies of this government. The three parties forming our government are the Center Party, the National Coalition and Blue Reform, a breakaway faction of the Finns Party, which was originally the third party in the coalition (read the previous post for details on that). During this governments time in office, the Finns Party/Blue Reform has always been bit of a pushover, as they've been the party to give in on their goals the most. Now, in order for a coalition government to work, you need to make compromises, the I'd say this isn't normal. This basically means that the Center and National coalition are really what we have to talk about.
The Center Party is weird in the sense that it's not really formed around specific policies. Instead, the common thing with their voters is where they live. You see, while the party has members from all across the political spectrum, their voters are mostly from the countryside or smaller cities, and since Finland is pretty sparsely populated, this gives them a pretty large voter base. This is probably why they've been so keen on the idea of giving more power to the regional level. And this creates the first problem with the current sote-discussion. Since the idea is to form these larger zones to handle healthcare instead of the municipalities, the Center Party has decided to merge their dream of a new regional government with sote-reform. Seems fair enough before you realize that Finland is divided into 19 regions and the plan is to divide the country roughly according to those lines. Now remember that earlier I said that according to experts, the optimal number of these larger zones would be between 5 and 8, while any model where the country is divided into more than 12 zones would not reach the wanted results. There's also the fact that from those 19 regions, only one, the autonomous region of Åland, actually has an elected regional council. In other words, the Center Parties plan would mean the formations 18 new local governments from scratch, to handle some of the tasks currently done by the municipalities. I hope you see why this idea has faced a lot of criticism. But this is only half of the story.
The other major player here is the National Coalition which is most likely the most business friendly party in Finland. In the past they've been pushing for increased privatization of public property and have seen the sote-discussion as a good way to get some more. As a result, they've promised to support the Center Parties goal of forming the new regional government, but in return are asking that the Center would support their "freedom of choice"-model. Officially this means that when needed, a "customer" could choose between a public or a private hospital and the government would pay for it. The idea is that by opening the public heath sector to private corporations, this would lead to an increase in options and quality as the powers of capitalism could do their work. Yeah, you can probably see the problem with this. Criticism towards this "freedom of choice" has been pretty heavy and critics have claimed that this would only lead to private companies maximizing their profits by taking in the easy cases, while leaving the public sector with the actually serious patients. This would actually mean larger costs while the whole idea of the reform was to cut them. The government has denied any chance that this would happen, but funny enough, they actually included some of the criticism in the bill they presented to parliament. Yes, their bill actually included reasons why it shouldn't be passed. This whole thing has been a disaster so I'm clad that the parliaments constitutional committee actually found the governments bill to be unconstitutional and thus put a delay on their plans.
And as if these buffoons coming up with a system that goes against what experts have told them and even against the constitution (which is another problems they've had) wasn't enough, the debate over this has led to some major infighting within the government. Members of the coalition partners have been criticizing each other. Most notable has been Jan Vapaavuori, the major of Helsinki, who is a member of National Coalition. He has criticized the Center Parties idea of forming the new level of regional government, as this would take power away from cities, which are increasing in size. He has also teamed up with other leaders of larger cities in criticism of the government. There have also been individual members of the Center Party that have publicly criticized the "freedom of choice"-model. At the moment, the government is trying to come up with a new bill, but has had problems with getting everybody to agree with, well, anything. Some are now speculating that this may lead up to another governmental crisis, this time causing the government to actually fall. Honestly, having seen what these guys have been doing, I would be completely fine with that.
Now, keep in mind, this is a simplified version of the whole discussion. There's a lot more that I could write about, but honestly, this whole thing is so complicated that I'm really not sure if I actually could explain it, especially in a foreign language. In order to show how complicated this is, I'll leave you with an actual chart the government used to present their idea. And just to point out, I'm a native Finnish speaker and I have no clue what this is supposed to say. Seriously, I have nothing to say about this picture.
My post about last summers governmental crisis:
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2017/11/was-prime-minister-lying.html
Since a lot of my visitors here are foreigners, I'll have to do some explaining first. Sote, is an abbreviation used when talking about heath and social services. It's currently being thrown around a lot because of an effort to reform these fields, in order to combat increasing costs, which puts a lot of pressure on the system. Probably the main reason for this is the aging population, a problem facing large parts of the western world. Because of this, in order to guarantee the same services in the future, plans were devised to curb some of the increasing costs, mainly by simplifying the administration. You see, currently these fields are being controlled on the municipal level. Since individual municipalities are allowed these things themselves, this means there are multiple different ways to handle this, which makes the current system hideously complicated. The main idea has been to take administration away from the municipalities and instead have some larger entity to take control. The plans call for forming larger zones, which would handle everything from healthcare, social security and in some cases unemployment services. This is supposed to simplify and cut cost from administration while still guaranteeing access to the same services for everybody as before. Experts have said that in order to optimize the effects, the number of these zones should be between 5 and 8, and that any model where the number would go above 12 simply wouldn't have the effects hoped for. Unfortunately, our current government hasn't done too well when it comes to listening to experts.
We have to look at what the parties forming the government stand for. Now, in a previous post I took a look at the governmental crisis we had last summer, but in that I didn't go into detail about the actual policies of this government. The three parties forming our government are the Center Party, the National Coalition and Blue Reform, a breakaway faction of the Finns Party, which was originally the third party in the coalition (read the previous post for details on that). During this governments time in office, the Finns Party/Blue Reform has always been bit of a pushover, as they've been the party to give in on their goals the most. Now, in order for a coalition government to work, you need to make compromises, the I'd say this isn't normal. This basically means that the Center and National coalition are really what we have to talk about.
The Center Party is weird in the sense that it's not really formed around specific policies. Instead, the common thing with their voters is where they live. You see, while the party has members from all across the political spectrum, their voters are mostly from the countryside or smaller cities, and since Finland is pretty sparsely populated, this gives them a pretty large voter base. This is probably why they've been so keen on the idea of giving more power to the regional level. And this creates the first problem with the current sote-discussion. Since the idea is to form these larger zones to handle healthcare instead of the municipalities, the Center Party has decided to merge their dream of a new regional government with sote-reform. Seems fair enough before you realize that Finland is divided into 19 regions and the plan is to divide the country roughly according to those lines. Now remember that earlier I said that according to experts, the optimal number of these larger zones would be between 5 and 8, while any model where the country is divided into more than 12 zones would not reach the wanted results. There's also the fact that from those 19 regions, only one, the autonomous region of Åland, actually has an elected regional council. In other words, the Center Parties plan would mean the formations 18 new local governments from scratch, to handle some of the tasks currently done by the municipalities. I hope you see why this idea has faced a lot of criticism. But this is only half of the story.
The other major player here is the National Coalition which is most likely the most business friendly party in Finland. In the past they've been pushing for increased privatization of public property and have seen the sote-discussion as a good way to get some more. As a result, they've promised to support the Center Parties goal of forming the new regional government, but in return are asking that the Center would support their "freedom of choice"-model. Officially this means that when needed, a "customer" could choose between a public or a private hospital and the government would pay for it. The idea is that by opening the public heath sector to private corporations, this would lead to an increase in options and quality as the powers of capitalism could do their work. Yeah, you can probably see the problem with this. Criticism towards this "freedom of choice" has been pretty heavy and critics have claimed that this would only lead to private companies maximizing their profits by taking in the easy cases, while leaving the public sector with the actually serious patients. This would actually mean larger costs while the whole idea of the reform was to cut them. The government has denied any chance that this would happen, but funny enough, they actually included some of the criticism in the bill they presented to parliament. Yes, their bill actually included reasons why it shouldn't be passed. This whole thing has been a disaster so I'm clad that the parliaments constitutional committee actually found the governments bill to be unconstitutional and thus put a delay on their plans.
And as if these buffoons coming up with a system that goes against what experts have told them and even against the constitution (which is another problems they've had) wasn't enough, the debate over this has led to some major infighting within the government. Members of the coalition partners have been criticizing each other. Most notable has been Jan Vapaavuori, the major of Helsinki, who is a member of National Coalition. He has criticized the Center Parties idea of forming the new level of regional government, as this would take power away from cities, which are increasing in size. He has also teamed up with other leaders of larger cities in criticism of the government. There have also been individual members of the Center Party that have publicly criticized the "freedom of choice"-model. At the moment, the government is trying to come up with a new bill, but has had problems with getting everybody to agree with, well, anything. Some are now speculating that this may lead up to another governmental crisis, this time causing the government to actually fall. Honestly, having seen what these guys have been doing, I would be completely fine with that.
Now, keep in mind, this is a simplified version of the whole discussion. There's a lot more that I could write about, but honestly, this whole thing is so complicated that I'm really not sure if I actually could explain it, especially in a foreign language. In order to show how complicated this is, I'll leave you with an actual chart the government used to present their idea. And just to point out, I'm a native Finnish speaker and I have no clue what this is supposed to say. Seriously, I have nothing to say about this picture.
My post about last summers governmental crisis:
http://helvetinpastori.blogspot.fi/2017/11/was-prime-minister-lying.html
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