(cont. from § 13) Health care, medical care and social care (cont. SoU1)
Translated from Swedish by AI; the translation may contain errors. The Swedish text is the original.
Summary AI, written in advance
MP considers that healthcare is underfunded and that the government prioritizes tax cuts for the wealthiest over the working conditions of staff 1. MP wants to invest in healthcare, primary care, women's healthcare, and psychiatry 1, oppose higher medicine costs, lower the high-cost protection 1 as well as improve support for persons with disabilities through free accompaniment and increased assistance payments 1. V considers that children in economic vulnerability are hit hard by the government's policy and that the benefit ceiling pressures families with children 2. V wants to build a country where children grow up in security 2 and argues that persons with disabilities lack freedom due to insufficient LSS interventions 3. V considers that the government and SD do not fight enough for the right to LSS as they propose a low increase of the assistance payment 3. V wants to index the assistance payment from a good level and has budgeted according to the collectively agreed wage increases 3. V argues that elderly care is in crisis due to cuts, market experiments, and profit interests 3. V demands an inquiry commission to review elderly care and wants to budget more in general state grants to municipalities and regions as well as index these 3.
Written by AI in advance and may contain errors. The numbers lead to the speech a statement builds on; check against the text below.
Nils Seye Larsen (MP)
Madam Speaker! The night between May 13 and 14, 2005, my life changed forever. As a young student at a party with my friends by Nydalasjön in Umeå, I had the stupid idea to take a dip in the lake without thinking about how deep it was. I jumped in headfirst, which caused my spinal cord to be compressed and I lost contact with my body. From the moment my friends rescued me from the water until the ambulance personnel took over and all the way through the nine months in the hospital that followed, the healthcare staff were completely decisive for me in my life.
I think about the ambulance staff's fantastic way of taking care of me in such a shocking situation, as well as the emergency care and the doctors there who were quickly forced to make important decisions. Looking back now, I realize that they were correct decisions. I also think of all the nursing assistants and nurses in the intensive care unit and the neuro-intensive care unit who were there through all my lows and troughs. The nights were the worst. That was when the nightmares took hold. But I think about how I always had someone who took care of me, listened, was there for me, and wiped the tears from my cheek when I could not yet do it myself.
I am thinking of all the physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social workers and doctors who gave me motivation and hope, care and treatment and who prepared me for the new life that awaited. They are all in my heart and are a big reason why I am here today.
This is my healthcare story, and there are thousands of others at different stages of life. But if there is one thing I have learned from it all, it is that when healthcare staff are given the conditions to do what they want to do, what they are trained for, their job – to care with care – is an invaluable and certainly rewarding and meaningful work.
That is why it hurts so much to see how the conditions for the people who carried me through my hardest time have deteriorated year after year. In an article in Dagens Nyheter, the Director General of the Swedish Work Environment Authority recently wrote that Swedish healthcare is being pushed to the limit, and it is the staff and the patients who pay the highest price. Three out of four workplaces within healthcare were flagged when the Swedish Work Environment Authority conducted inspections. The deficiencies are well known, but the problems persist year after year. The results from the Swedish Work Environment Authority's national supervision leave no one in doubt: Swedish healthcare has a structural work environment problem that is now so serious that it affects both the quality of care and the health of healthcare staff.
Swedish healthcare is, in other words, in a very strained position, and the underfunding of healthcare worsens the situation. Despite this, the government is cutting state funds for healthcare in this year's budget. They have chosen to prioritize tax cuts for the very wealthiest, while healthcare's invaluable staff are being brought to their knees.
For Miljöpartiet, it is completely the wrong way to go. In our budget, we therefore make large investments in healthcare. We invest 3 billion in a sector grant to healthcare in order to be able to give the regions the conditions to invest in care and staff and to be able to hire more and improve the working conditions for the healthcare's invaluable employees. We invest 1.5 billion in a primary care boost to strengthen primary care throughout the country. It is a long-term investment to achieve a functioning primary care, which constitutes the hub of your care, regardless of where you live.
When it comes to women's health, maternity care, and childbirth care, we know that there are major deficiencies all over Sweden. This concerns both a lack of knowledge about women-specific diseases and deficiencies in treatment regarding continuity and diagnostics. Many women experience that the healthcare system does not listen to them and does not take their problems seriously. Despite this, the government chooses in this year's budget to reduce the investments in women's healthcare and childbirth care by over one third. For Miljöpartiet, this is unacceptable, and we therefore choose to invest 600 million kronor in an enhanced women's healthcare and childbirth care.
Madam Speaker! We know that the pressure on child and adolescent psychiatry is heavy and that they are struggling to cope. For children and young people who are desperately waiting for help, it can have consequences that follow throughout their entire lives. Children and young people must be able to receive help in time, and this also applies during the transition to adulthood. If this transition does not work, the consequences can be devastating, both for the individual and for society. Therefore, Miljöpartiet wants to invest half a billion to strengthen psychiatry, with a particular focus on the transition between child and adolescent psychiatry and adult psychiatry.
Madam Speaker! The government's choice to replace long-term perspective in healthcare with micro-management is the wrong path to take. Performance-based reimbursements linked to care beds and queues lead, at best, to a marginal change. It also leads to more administration and more pressure on the staff, but not to better long-term care. The regions do not need micro-management and short-term volatility from Stockholm. They need resources and long-term sustainable conditions to be able to plan healthcare based on their regional needs.
Madam Speaker! We say no to higher medicine costs and the increased high-cost protection for medicines, which hits the sick, the elderly, and persons with various disabilities the hardest and strikes most severely against the most vulnerable in society. No one should have to forgo necessary medicine because they cannot afford it. In our budget, we therefore choose to allocate over 2 billion to lower the high-cost protection for medicines to the level that applied before the government's sharp increase.
In recent decades, we have unfortunately seen how the support for people with disabilities has deteriorated significantly. These are people who have been denied or lost their assistance, companionship, or transport services – the list can be long. This is completely unacceptable, and it is with sorrow that I observe that we in Sweden have moved further and further away from our goal of universal accessibility and full participation.
For us in Miljöpartiet, it is obvious that a major overhaul is needed. We are investing 70 million kronor in free escort services for people with visual impairments. It is inconceivable that we in Sweden have people with visual impairments who become involuntarily isolated from society at large because they are only granted extremely limited escort services, which can also be expensive depending on where in the country one lives. We need to get a new escort law and free escort services.
For people with personal assistance, the personal assistants are absolutely crucial for life. In order for them to be able to keep their personal assistants, it is obvious that one needs to be able to offer reasonable employment conditions. Therefore, the government's budget was a double betrayal, partly because the promised indexation of the assistance allowance was missing, and partly because the adjustment was so catastrophically low.
This is a fatal blow to personal assistance that we in Miljöpartiet cannot accept. Therefore, we choose in our budget to invest 475 million kronor in raising the assistance allowance by 3 percent.
Madam Speaker! This summer, a new Social Services Act was introduced, the largest social policy change in almost 50 years. It implies a significant increase in ambition for a preventive and knowledge-based social service. But if the resource reinforcements do not materialize, this reform risks remaining at beautiful words without practical change.
We must invest in preventive work, and therefore we in Miljöpartiet have chosen an investment in precisely the social services' preventive work with 300 million kronor.
Madam Speaker! We have less than a year left until the election. It is now completely clear that the government's line is cuts, micro-management, and worsened conditions for healthcare staff.
The Green Party's position is the opposite. We invest in welfare and healthcare. We prioritize a well-functioning welfare throughout the country over tax cuts for the very richest. We invest in healthcare personnel and their working environment.
That is how we retain healthcare's invaluable employees. That is how we shorten the care queues in the long term. That is how we strengthen patient safety, and that is how we build a healthcare system that lasts – today, tomorrow, and for the future.
I cannot vote in favor of our budget as much as I would like to, but we have a separate statement for those who wish to read more.
In this speech, Camilla Hansén, Katarina Luhr and Jan Riise (all MP) concurred.
Maj Karlsson (V)
Madam Speaker! For me and my party, children's right to a good life is not a slogan. It is a promise, which shall apply to all children. For the ground we prepare for the children growing up in Sweden today will become the soil that the adults of the future shall stand on.
A society is never stronger than its weakest link. In Sweden, we stand today with a chain where link after link is about to break. The housing queues are historically long, rents are skyrocketing, and unemployment is at a record high. Food prices and electricity prices are pushing households to the breaking point.
In a recession and a time of high inflation, one might think that the government realizes that when everyone is hit hard, some are hit almost unbearably hard. Those who are always hit worst in every crisis are women and children, and so it is even now. The gap between children who live in secure economic stability and children who do not has increased dramatically. There are 200,000 children in Sweden living in poverty, but it does not seem to affect this government at all, at least not if one looks at their policy. In the SD-led government's priorities, it is not included that every child should be able to take the most basic things for granted. For them, it is obviously acceptable that some children fall hard.
Madam Speaker! The Minister for Finance speaks of freedom reforms when she lowers taxes. But what freedom does ten-year-old Anders feel? Anders worries that the money won't be enough for the rent and doesn't dare say that he needs new shoes. He knows that electricity has become expensive and that every krona must be stretched. He does not belong to the group that receives a share of the tax cuts. He is just a child who has to take the full brunt of the economic crisis – one of 200,000 children who have ended up in the government's dead zone.
That this is the government's line becomes even clearer when they declare in this year's budget that they want to introduce a benefit ceiling – a ceiling that does not lift people but pushes them even deeper into economic vulnerability. The government tries to paint social assistance as a comfortable life and uses exaggerated and directly incorrect examples. They pretend as if benefits are stacked. They make it sound as if large families with children live a life of luxury. They gaslight people by claiming that this is so children can see their parents go to work, while the government's own policy causes people to lose their jobs every day and unemployment reaches new record levels. But the responsibility for this, they intend to shift onto families with children.
In its own budget, the government writes that the proportion of people receiving social assistance is decreasing, which it has done for a long time. It is the proportion who are forced to live on the support for a long time that is increasing. What the government does not mention is that most recipients are single men. In that case, one would have needed to acknowledge that the reform does not hit them but rather families with children.
It has also never been so difficult to live on social assistance as it is now. Never has it paid off so much to work, provided that one succeeds in getting a job. But the government remains silent about this, because if the truth were on the table, no one could defend this policy. Then it would have become clear that it is children in economic vulnerability that the government has chosen to target.
Madam Speaker! Child poverty sounds like something that disappears when the child grows up, but that is not the case. A child who grows up in poverty carries the consequences throughout their entire life. The children who go hungry today risk living in deep vulnerability tomorrow. For children who grow up without basic security, life chances shrink year by year.
In my own city, Gothenburg, you can take the tram from our richest to our poorest areas and see how life expectancy drops stop by stop. Today, there is a difference of almost eight years in life expectancy between Saltholmen and Bergsjön. What will that figure be after even more years of the right's economic policy?
The government's policy does not only cost the children their security today. It costs them their tomorrow. In some cases, it even costs them their lifetime. It sounds harsh, but it is no less true.
Madam Speaker! We in Vänsterpartiet want to build a country where real freedom prevails, where people are allowed to contribute, are allowed to feel needed and are allowed to live in security. We know that a child's upbringing is the backbone of society, where everything begins.
We want every child in Sweden to be able to wake up in a safe home with breakfast on the table. We want their parents to be able to go to a real job in a functioning labor market and for the children to be able to go to a school where their education is at the center and have a leisure time where they feel meaning and community. It is about priorities. It is about values.
A society is never stronger than its weakest link, and when the weakest link is our children, it is not the children who need to be punished. Then we need a new government.
Nadja Awad (V)
Madam Speaker! Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson can start his day whenever he wants. He can take a walk in the forest, grill with his family, and choose which sweater he wants to wear. He can take a warm shower, maybe a little too long sometimes, and even take the time to cook a lovely lasagna. But according to the government and the Sweden Democrats, that freedom should only apply to some and not everyone.
Today, people with disabilities do not have that freedom. For them, LSS interventions such as personal assistance or companionship do not mean a few hours of help, but it is the difference between freedom and lack of freedom – between a life on one's own terms and a life in dependence, in isolation, and in institutions.
For Patrik, who has a CP injury, it is the difference between lying bedridden for 18 hours and being able to go to Hammarby matches.
For Emelie, who is 24 years old, blind and wheelchair-bound, it is the difference between being able to decide for herself when she wants to move out of home or have a coffee in town and being completely dependent on her parents.
For four-year-old Lian, who cannot stand, see, hear or speak, it means a difference for the whole family – the difference between a 19-hour workday for dad and being able to spend quality time with his daughter without being completely exhausted.
For Konrad, 10 years old, it is the freedom for him to play with his toy tractors and park them as many times as he wants with the help of the personal assistant's hands.
But the government and the Sweden Democrats are not fighting hard enough to ensure that freedom is not snatched away from these people, because right now they are tearing apart the right to LSS for people with disabilities.
Year after year, the Swedish Riksdag has decided on low increases of the assistance allowance. Now the government, with the help of Sverigedemokraterna, proposes an increase of the assistance allowance of only 1.5 percent. This is lower than the collectively agreed wage increases. How is it possible to recruit and retain personal assistants if the cost of the collectively agreed wage increases is not compensated? How is it possible to work with the work environment and quality when almost every krona goes to wages and wage costs?
How are families supposed to cope when they can no longer receive assistance of good quality? The assistants are seeking opportunities elsewhere. How are the assistants supposed to continue developing in their work if there is no room for further education?
Assistansanordnare are being pressured, staff are being worn out, and users risk losing their freedom. The underfunding is an attack on fundamental rights and the freedom reform that personal assistance entails.
That is why I am proud that Vänsterpartiet is one of the two parties in the Riksdag that has budgeted according to the collectively agreed wage increases. We also want to index the assistance allowance from a good level, so that it does not risk being eroded when a right-wing government chooses to prioritize tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires or increased luxury ROT grants to finance high-income earners' tiling in Östermalm apartments.
Madam Speaker! The government itself promised an indexation. It was presented in pictures. But when the budget arrived, the promise was gone. Then they rewrote their own texts in retrospect and pretended as if the promise had never existed. It is unworthy, and it is a betrayal – not against me, but against tens of thousands of people.
Madam Speaker! Let us also speak about Sweden's sorrow child: elderly care. In several places, elderly care today is worse than before the pandemic. We in Vänsterpartiet think that enough is enough with cuts and market experiments in elderly care, but the government and Sverigedemokraterna are turning a blind eye to reality.
Martin Tivéus, CEO of the healthcare and elderly care company Attendo, earns 876,500 kronor every month, which is as much as 31 nursing assistants combined. At the same time, we know that there are lower wages, worse pensions, and fewer staff members within just profit-seeking healthcare and elderly care companies. This is the result of our tax money not staying in elderly care but being allowed to disappear from the staff's wages and from the elderly's right to a place in special housing, and instead becoming profits for CEOs and dividends to shareholders.
At the same time, all around Sweden, we have nursing assistants and healthcare assistants who hunt for discount prices on food, skip meals to feed their children, and worry about taking parental leave or getting sick. This government, as the only government in the Nordic countries, even imposes a penalty fee on workers who become ill. At the same time, we have elderly people who say they feel lonelier than ever and do not get time to talk to the staff who care for them.
Madam Speaker! In the municipalities' elderly care, the operations are governed by cost requirements. Care is measured in minutes where every visit is timed as if people were machines. It is called minute management, and it has gone so far that the staff receive minutes specified on paper for how long it is allowed to take to wash the hair of the elderly. The elderly apologize if the toilet visit takes extra long.
The staff are stressed and run between users, which means they do not have time to take their statutory break. They are even forced to change tampons in the forest. Still, it happens that elderly people who alert about a stroke do not get help in time due to staff shortages. The staff shortage means that the staff must choose between giving insulin and running to alarms.
Furthermore, nursing assistants and healthcare assistants are being deported on an assembly line, in the midst of a staff and competence shortage crisis. I am not making this up, Madam Speaker. This is the reality.
Before the election, Ulf Kristersson said that we must protect our old and elderly and that elderly care must be strengthened. Now that he is in power, twelve people have died as a result of deficiencies in home care. Five of them alarmed without help arriving. It is heartbreaking, and it is a political responsibility.
Why is the SD-led government closing its eyes to the harsh, inhumane reality in elderly care? Does the government and the Sweden Democrats think that these people should step aside for the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires – state subsidies for cleaning help or tiling in the summer house for the wealthiest households?
Care must be based on trust, not on stopwatches. The elderly and the staff must have the authority to decide when visits should take place and how long a visit should be allowed to last. The budget must never govern human value.
Vänsterpartiet therefore demands that an inquiry commission be appointed to review the entire elderly care system, from resource distribution to working conditions. It must no longer be possible to turn a blind eye to the crisis that the Tidö Government has deepened.
We in Vänsterpartiet have also consistently budgeted so that the municipalities can afford to develop, not cut back, their operations. This year there is no difference: We budget 8 billion kronor more than the government does in general state grants to the municipalities and regions. Furthermore, we want to index those state grants.
This is about priorities, Madam Speaker. The government has chosen to lower the taxes for themselves and for the very richest at the expense of elderly care, at the expense of the staff, and at the expense of the elderly's right to security. We see the result now. It is elderly care in total failure in many parts of Sweden.
But this can be reversed if we choose to invest in people instead of in tax cuts, if we choose dignity instead of profit and if we choose trust over control. Vänsterpartiet stands ready to take responsibility for rebuilding elderly care again – for the staff, for the elderly and for a society that holds together.
The deliberation was hereby concluded.
Source: The Swedish Parliament. The speeches come from the open data of the Riksdag, translated into English by AI, which may contain errors.