Additional investment in health care deemed indispensable

A business analyst believes that despite strong attacks on the government for the sad state of the public health service, all political sides actually agree on the necessity to spend more on health care.

In Figyelő, Csaba Szajlai warns that the 4 per cent of GDP the budget spends on health care is blatantly insufficient. On the other hand, he writes, the present high growth rate would allow for more. As he sees it, the government has by now realized that most citizens rank the state of the National Health Service as the most burning problem in Hungary and is therefore ready to spend more on hospitals. Szajlai’s commentary is illustrated by three graphs. One shows a decline in the number of physicians leaving Hungary, which peaked in 2012 and was back to under 400 last year. Another shows the data of 16 hospitals with deficits of over a billion Forints this year, while a third shows Hungary fourth from bottom among thirty countries in terms of the number of CT machines per million inhabitants – albeit followed by advanced countries like Spain, Slovenia and Israel.

Tags: health