Handicapped by old and new traps: Hungary's health care reform

Since the early 1980s, grave challenges have faced Hungarian health policy. The health status of the population stagnated between the mid‐1960s and mid‐1970s, and has dramatically deteriorated since then. In the 1980s the multidimensional crisis of the health care system deepened. Its overhaul must embrace every component: policy‐making, ownership, financing, management, service structure, patient rights, medical education, etc. The main purpose of this paper is to describe how health policy has (or has not) responded to these challenges. First it summarizes the inheritance of the state‐socialist regime, then it outlines the recent changes in social insurance legislation, and finally it compares official goals with the way the reform is actually proceeding. The paper is intended to discuss the connection between health care reform and the historic transformation of the political regime and the economy.