Hungarian healthcare system to be privatised?
PM Viktor Orbán said he in his morning interview that he was against privatising health-care services, while “health privatisation has persistently been included in the left-wing programme because many of them have lobbied for business groups interested in a private health care … they have an interest in opening up business opportunities for international investors.”
While Hungary is “on the right track, it is far from being a rich country yet,” he said, adding that the privatisation of health care would mean low earners being left without health services. The government aims to ensure the best possible services through a state-owned and state-controlled health system, Orbán added.
The ruling government is giving the 13th month pensions and has regularly raised the minimum wage and salaries in certain sectors, he said, adding that the labour market was now tight,
tax rates were “very good in European comparison, and economic growth is around 7 percent rather than 2 or 3 percent,”
he added.
Orbán said that besides “mistakes and sins committed until 2010”, the leftist parties had also refused to support the government’s efforts to rectify those missteps afterwards, Orbán said. They did not vote for proposals or tax cuts or the re-introduction of the 13th month pension, and regularly attacked recent measures such as the caps on food and fuel prices and the interest rate cap on mortgages with variable interest rates, he said.
Orbán slammed the leftist opposition for
“attacking coronavirus protection measures
in a way that offends doctors and nurses, and degrades the work done in hospitals.” Hungary’s health-care system is working hard to help all those in need, and workers deserve commendation for that, he said. The vaccine rollout is going well everywhere, he added.
While discussions on the best way to organise pandemic protection efforts are useful, the Hungarian opposition “falsified facts, produced fake videos and weakened the effectiveness of the protection efforts,” he said. “The left wing cannot differentiate between attacking the government and degrading the country,” he said.
On the subject of the coronavirus situation, Orbán said that
the number of new cases was on the rise, but fewer people needed to be intubated on a ventilator and the number of hospitalisations was significantly lower than new infections.
Source: MTI