Now I would like to know just how cheaply young people are willing to grind out a 10-hour day in, for example, the healthcare or education sectors, where the work is notoriously very meaningful. Is 5 euros an hour enough, or is 10 euros an hour still required even if money isn’t an end in itself? As long as the boss is nice and the office has new furniture.
Or is this talk about work and money as ends in themselves some kind of ideological wish that we as a society cannot afford—and consequently, neither can individuals.
So, does one hour a week really allow for good native language learning? What kind of learning materials are used? It’s been a while since my own school days, of course, and the world has changed, but I recall that the native language was taught for several hours a week back then. Even Swedish had more than one hour per week.
That hour is for studying their own mother tongue in addition to basic education. It doesn’t replace any of the hours associated with comprehensive school. The lessons also take place outside of the regular timetable.
Something like this, for example, with the Japanese language:
And then maybe 5,000 euros a year is invested into some smaller language group. And the children of this language group enjoy this mind-blowing stream of information for a few years, absorbing and internalizing even the smallest nuances from their mother-tongue instruction.
After which they are 100% ready to tackle Finnish grammatical cases and other linguistic questions, brimming with enthusiasm and achieving great success.
What could go wrong? Actually, I suspect the situation on the ground might look a bit different.
Some, however, seem to strongly believe in the omnipotence of the Finnish civil service, no matter how desperate the conditions or the situation may be. The system takes care of everything, always; let us not worry, the situation is perfectly under control and for the best. There is no way we can fail in this matter either.
Good grief, ‘Regulatory Finland’ is really going for it.
As long as they figure out how to legally organize remote advisory services for ‘risk products’.
Vitamin and iron supplements, laxatives, and eye-moisturizing artificial tears could be sold without pharmaceutical advice.
Medium-risk products include, among others, some diarrhea and constipation medications, cold medicines, and allergy medicines. Meanwhile, the risk medicine classification includes both of the most commonly used painkillers, i.e., ibuprofen and paracetamol.
A different result would have been unexpected. How convenient that the Finnish Commerce Federation just happened to support candidates in the parliamentary elections.
The grocery trade’s desire to include self-care medicines in their product ranges is quite understandable; it would provide a nice boost to margins. On the other hand, there isn’t much willingness to take responsibility for any problems arising from the sale of these medicines, nor does the grocery trade want to be involved in crisis management and security of supply issues for medicines—after all, these incur costs and require pharmaceutical expertise.
The grocery trade’s claim that prices for consumers would decrease seems a bit strange compared to the current situation. Currently, the prices of all medicines are regulated, so it doesn’t matter where you buy them, although loyalty programs may offer some discounts.
If there were a desire to liberalize competition regarding medicines, there are two viable measures that would not compromise drug safety. Firstly, the license to establish a pharmacy would be granted to all holders of a Master of Science in Pharmacy (proviisori) degree (since that degree is already a prerequisite for becoming a pharmacy owner), and secondly, the pricing of over-the-counter medicines would be deregulated. This alone would certainly create competition in a completely different way than in the current situation.
I personally approach the deregulation of non-prescription drugs from my own—meaning the customer’s—perspective, in the sense that if there is a need, it feels silly to have to bother going all the way to the pharmacist’s doorstep specifically, and only when their doors are open.
I don’t know about that fixed pricing for basic products, but it sounds strange; the law should be changed then.
At least from what I’ve experienced when buying limited supplies for my family from the pharmacy, no special responsibility has been taken on my behalf, let alone a promise that the responsibility would extend to the person who eventually puts the ibuprofen in their mouth.
It is, of course, true that in a grocery store, a person with relevant questions doesn’t have the same kind of support to get an appropriate answer. That’s why remote consultation is needed. At the same time, one could call for the improvement of the instructions included in the packaging.
I don’t know exactly about those security of supply issues, but I imagine they are easily managed in this day and age as long as the matter is defined. Since logistics work, whether it’s the wholesaler’s warehouses or the transport from there to retail stores.
BTW, the introduction of generic vs. brand substitution into legislation was a great development and a good example of how the legislator can, if they wish, promote the curbing of unnecessary costs—whether paid out of one’s own pocket or by customers.
S Group and Kesko already have plans in place for how they would handle the matter. The whole thing would be ready in a single weekend, basically. And they would do it much more efficiently than the current regulated and corrupt system. If regulation is desired, it’s easy to require that there must be, for instance, pharmacists or Master Pharmacists on staff. The current system mainly benefits overpaid pharmacy owners.
Using the same arguments, could one start restricting the entire retail sector?
Making over-the-counter (OTC) medicines available in thousands of retail locations (K- and S-group stores, Tokmanni, R-Kiosks…) would, in itself, improve the security of supply. Especially considering the situation in many declining municipalities suffering from depopulation, I believe it is justified that the local village shop should provide as wide a range of services as possible for various needs. This is important not only for the services available to residents but also for the viability of these shops.
Wait a minute, haven’t vitamins and iron supplements been available on the “natural product shelves” of supermarkets for a long time? You should go and see all the unbelievable Dr. Tolonen (Tohtori Tolonen) nonsense being sold in that section in any larger Prisma.
It’s possible that the strongest vitamins are only available at pharmacies. I personally take Minisun’s extra-strong multivitamin, and I haven’t found it in regular grocery stores.
The strongest opposition to this change will certainly be found in those municipalities suffering from population decline. The S and K Groups would very quickly compete private pharmacies in small villages out of the market, and pharmacists haven’t traditionally made a living on prescription sales alone. Pharmacies in urban centers will surely survive, but the remaining ones in remote villages will die out almost immediately. That’s just the way of the world today.
Based on 2022 figures, prescription drugs accounted for 86% of pharmacy sales, while over-the-counter (OTC) drugs accounted for 14%.
In Finland, over 90% of pharmacies have an operating profit exceeding €100,000, and 6% exceed €500,000. Naturally, these figures do not include, for example, the sales of natural health products that many pharmacies run as separate businesses within the same premises as the pharmacy.
It is certainly good that the industry is able to conduct profitable business and, for instance, only one pharmacy goes bankrupt on average every few years. However, there is no reason to grant the industry a competitive advantage in the form of exclusive sales rights for over-the-counter drugs. Welcome to the market economy and competition. That is the reality grocery stores and kiosks have to live with as well.
That’s exactly it. If you’re talking about any small Finnish town, how do you know who the top earner in the municipality is? It’s easy: just Google the name of that town’s pharmacist.
In my opinion, a law should be passed stating that factories could only be owned by engineers, and paper mills only by paper engineers. Ownership of breweries could be restricted to alcoholics. This way, the overall interest of society would be better taken into account.
However, it’s worth remembering that by law, pharmacists are sole proprietors (T:mi), and the pharmacy’s profit from medicine sales is taxed as the pharmacist’s personal income. (Non-medicinal products are usually sold through a separate limited liability company.) Other entrepreneurs in the municipality earning 200K a year can draw large incomes partly tax-free.
Nonsense. The role of pharmacists could be compared to a store manager at an Alepa or Sale. Except that those store managers have much more work and more customers. You don’t see many store managers at the top of the high-earner lists, do you?
PS. To correct myself, a better comparison would be a small K-Market. But the point still stands. If a K-retailer is on the lists, it’s probably a large Citymarket, where the scale of operations, personal investment, and everything else is on a completely different level. In those cases, we are talking about actual entrepreneurs in a free market.
