Municipalities preparing for the Finnish social welfare and healthcare reform (SOTE)
The social welfare and healthcare and regional government reform was intended to transfer social and healthcare services to 18 regions from 2021 onwards, and municipal income tax would have been cut by approximately 12.5 percentage points to transfer the corresponding share of funding to the state. As the reform was delayed, municipalities began, however, to secure their own position by outsourcing services through long-term contracts and selling social and healthcare properties to private parties — particularly because the properties of individual municipalities would not have been transferred to the regions but only leased on a short-term basis. Attempts were made to curb this sub-optimisation through temporary restrictive legislation. (AI translation)
