What are you to do when you get sick in Budapest? Oh you have nothing to worry about. There are some luxurious hospitals you can always visit; equipped with English speaking staffs, when you have the money. In fact, Budapest is internationally known to be a cheaper destination for medical tourism, especially for dentistry. Sure, rich tourists get to have everything they want, don’t they?

Sadly, it is not that simple for the native inhabitants. A Briton (GNP per capita in 2003 = USD 26,650) might say that GBP 700 is cheap for a dental implant, while a Hungarian whose country’s GNP per inhabitant in 2003 is USD 5,590 would find it the opposite. As Espicom wrote: “With a population of 10 million, Hungary is a landlocked country in central Europe. It joined the European Union in May 2004. The poor health of the nation remains a problem, especially for men, where life expectancy remains significantly behind western European levels.”

To overcome the high cost for medical treatment, the country has a socialized healthcare system where people have to pay 3% of their gross salary; added with 15% which is paid by the employers for their health insurance each month. This insurance covers some free of charge services, such as: preventive medical examinations, medical care by family physicians (primary health care services), dental care, out-patient care, in-patient care, delivery care, medical rehabilitation, patient transportation, and accident health supply.

That was the theory, anyhow. The reality is that you must spend some amount of your salary on the insurance, but you would still have to pay extra costs whenever illness catches you. Dentistry is one thing that is absolutely not free in Hungary. Your health insurance would mean nothing when it comes to dental care, despite of what is written on the National Health Insurance website. However, other specialties are a little bit different. When your illness require you to stay in the state-owned hospital, as your health insurance would direct you to, you would get officially free of charge treatment, except for the medicine and hálapénz. The latter is the tip you should pay to your doctor and nurses to insure you would get better treatment. It depends on how many people would take care of you; and you should be able to count how much you ought to spend on this. Believe me, you would not want to know what would happen if you “forgot” to pay this tribute.

Hungary, as other countries which are common destination for medical tourism, has weak medical malpractice law. Some hospitals in the country could no longer get malpractice insurance from insurance companies because simply there were too many malpractice cases happened.

It is not likely for people in lower and middle class society to escape these state-owned hospitals and share a room with several other strangers, if they are lucky enough to get one. If not; then the corridor would suit also for this treatment. The big questions here are: “What does this insurance actually cover?” and “Where does your money go?”

It is hard to offer any answer to both, but this system does not seem to serve its initial purpose of helping the poor. The truth is that the well-off stay rich while the second-rate people get poorer because they have to pay double price for their healthcare treatment.

Hospital privatization might be a better solution for this situation. It was then surprising that the idea was turned down last year. Of course these private hospitals exist even nowadays, such as the Telki Private Hospital. It offers for services with ranged cost between HUF 30,000 and 500,000. However, since opening, the hospital’s performance did not match initial expectations, and has been generating losses ever since its launch.

What a surprise! If many people had that much money to spare on medical treatment, they would have changed their twenty years old Trabant into at least the smallest series of BMW. Nevertheless, privatization would also mean more private hospitals which have to compete with each others to attract more patients; which can also mean better services with more reasonable price. But again, this is Hungary, so things might turn otherwise.

This has been originally posted here on April 25, 2005