What Happened to Healthcare Reform?
What Happened to Healthcare Reform?

Summary/Abstract: Ever since the crisis that preceded the introduction of the “Bokros Package” in 1995, which was aimed at the stabilization of public finances (and named after the finance minister of the time), it has been obvious to every competent expert in economic policy that the fundamental issue of reform of healthcare services is financing – or, in other words, reform of the health insurance system. Although from 1992 the system became nominally “insurance-based,” compromises made by health policy experts of Prime Minister József Antall’s government, which came to power in 1990, led very quickly to a situation where everything returned to the old order of things. On the three decisive levels of healthcare services – GPs (general practitioners, or family doctors), specialized out-patient clinics, and hospitals – the state-controlled healthcare system inherited from the last decades of socialism survived and remained practically intact. If we read again the party manifestos, government programmes and statements of successive ministers of health published in the early 1990s, it is absolutely clear that the Antall government aimed to establish a multi-company insurance system in healthcare services, taking the German system as a model. At that time in Hungary, as well as in the international literature dealing with the economics of healthcare provision, this model was referred to as the “return to the Bismarck system.”[…] This essay was published in a volume of essays by the author entitled: “Why is the Hungarian economy in a bad way?” – HVG Publishing, June 2008.

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