Hungary: a health system in transition

Hungary has an area of 93,030 square kilometers (35,900 square miles), the size of the state of Indiana in the United States. It is landlocked by the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic to the north, Austria to the west, Yugoslavia to the south, and Romania and the Soviet Union to the east. Although the health care system is based on the Soviet system, there have been dramatic changes since 1991, when the soviet Union and its Eastern European partners discarded their communist structures and the Soviet empire was disbanded. In this report, the current Hungarian health care system and the political structure in which it is housed will be described in terms of a key set of characteristics and their subparts. The purpose of this approach is to facilitate comparison of the Hungarian system with other national health care systems. An expanded version of this article will appear in an upcoming second edition of the College's book, International Health Care: A Framework for Comparing National Health Care Systems, by Drs. Mendoza and Henderson.