At the core of Swedish elections this Sunday is fixing the healthcare system — something that matters to voters the most. The political parties from the left to the right wing are making promises, but health experts say none of them cut to the core of the issue.
Long waits, staff shortages and poor primary care quality due to low staffing have become familiar features of the Swedish healthcare debate since the pandemic, turning the health service into a test of whether the country’s welfare model is still delivering what voters expect.
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Political parties across the political spectrum are promising solutions for the issue that matters the most for Swedish voters, but doctors and nurses question whether the changes are what the system actually needs, pointing to improving working conditions and staffing, as well as strengthening primary care.
Getting it right could grant political parties many votes, as some 64% of voters named healthcare among their most important political issues in an August poll, up from 55% in May, followed by education and crime and public safety. Some voters are ready to even change a party that pays attention to healthcare, according to separate polling by Novus for pharmaceutical industry group Lif, which found that 34% could consider changing parties.
With that in mind, parties are pitching increasingly ambitious campaign pledges for fixing the healthcare system ahead of the 13 September election.
The political proposals
The most ambitious overhauls of the system are coming from centre-right parties.
To ensure faster access to healthcare, something that has become a headache for many Swedes, the centre-right Moderate Party, currently third in polls, wants to cut the statutory healthcare guarantee, which limits how long patients should wait for specialist care, from 90 days to 30. However, currently some patients have to wait even beyond the 90 days.
According to Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare, 27% of patients were waiting for planned specialist surgery or treatment beyond Sweden’s 90-day healthcare guarantee in April 2026. The Moderate Party is offering that if a region could not provide care within 30 days, the patient would have to be offered treatment elsewhere, with the home region covering the cost.
Meanwhile, the Christian Democrats, the second-to-last party in the polls, are offering an overhaul of the century-old system. They want to replace the country’s region-based healthcare system with a state-run model, arguing that regional boundaries create unequal care and prevent Sweden from making efficient use of capacity across the country and, in turn, reducing waiting times.
Social Democrats, who are leading the polls, are after the primary healthcare system — pledging that at least 80% of Swedes should have a named doctor by 2030. Centre Party also promises to introduce named doctors, while the Liberals want to create 4,500 more general practitioner positions.
No silver bullet
However, none of the reforms pitched by political parties in Sweden is a “miracle solution” to fix it all, Fanny Nilsson, an internal medicine doctor, board member of the Swedish Society of Medicine and an author who travelled across Europe comparing healthcare systems, told Euronews Health.
Experts Euronews spoke to argue that politicians, while focused on cutting the waiting times, are missing the core of the issue: workforce shortages, poor retention, excessive administrative burdens and an under-resourced primary care system.
“If those issues are not addressed, waiting lists will persist,” Hanna Kataoka, president of the Swedish Medical Association, told Euronews.
The Swedish healthcare paradox
A lack of primary care professionals and a lack of continuity, with patients often unable to see the same doctor over time, creates a paradox at the heart of Swedish healthcare, Nilsson said.
“We are very strong and good at very specialist advanced care. We are quite advanced in research and adopting new technologies and new pharmaceuticals,” Nilsson said.
“But how can we have the best healthcare in the world when you cannot get hold of your GP?” she added.
The numbers are backing her words. In 2024, some 7% of Swedes reported being unable to get the primary care they felt they needed, more than twice the EU average of 3%, according to OECD data. Meanwhile, seven in ten primary-care doctors were responsible for more patients than recommended, according to a 2026 Swedish Medical Association report.
While parties such as Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Centre Party vowed to fix this issue, Nilsson says that it lacks a concrete long-term vision for delivering it.
The proposed fixes for the healthcare system are “just dumbing the debate,” she said.
“It just makes all of these questions too shallow, too dumb, and that is, I think, also why the voters in Sweden are having difficulties following the healthcare debate,” she said, urging politicians to look at healthcare systems beyond their four-year terms.
Will parties’ campaign pledges work?
The same goes for the promises from the Moderate Party and Christian democrats.
The 30-day guarantee could expand the role of private healthcare providers concentrated in large cities such as Stockholm, as rural areas, particularly northern Sweden, lack enough staff and could be forced to send patients elsewhere.
“Then the patients are going to be flown to Stockholm, get surgery there, and be flown back,” Nilsson said.
Leaving staffing issues in regions unsolved and instead relying on private healthcare providers is not a good way to look at healthcare,” she said.
As for the Christian Democrats’ ambition to completely upend the century-old system, experts are sceptical that changing the level of government responsible for healthcare would itself solve its problems.
“A major structural reform risks consuming years of political attention without addressing the issues that matter most: workforce shortages, working conditions, primary care capacity and long-term planning,” Kataoka said.
Nilsson says the Christian Democrats are “right in saying that the state should be more involved”, but argues that changing who runs healthcare is not the same as fixing what is wrong with it.
Sweden’s hospital-bed shortage
Nilsson points to another problem she sees at the heart of specialist care — Sweden’s exceptionally low hospital-bed capacity, with only 1.9 hospital beds per 1,000 people in 2023, the lowest level in the EU.
She says poor working conditions are a major reason behind it, with only a third of Sweden’s healthcare workforce not doing overtime and just one in ten able to take a break during the working day.
This leads doctors to discharge patients earlier than they would like or spend large amounts of time trying to move patients between wards and hospitals because beds are unavailable.
“It’s causing a lot of ethical stress. ‘Who to discharge? How do I clear a bed?’,” she said.
“It's awful work that we are doing that many doctors are very upset about.”
A 2024 investigation by medical publication Sjukhusläkaren found that bed, staffing or resource shortages and high workloads were contributing factors in 100 of the 237 hospital deaths it examined from 2023.
Kataoka said the biggest improvement to doctors’ ability to treat patients would be “more time for patients”, requiring better staffing, stronger continuity of care, less bureaucracy and better-functioning IT systems.
“A major structural reform risks consuming years of political attention without addressing the issues that matter most: workforce shortages, working conditions, primary care capacity, and long-term planning. These problems require sustained action regardless of the governance model.”
