Hungarian rail workers, doctors and teachers staged strikes Monday as parliament prepared to pass watershed legislation to open the state healthcare system to private insurance firms for the first time.
The healthcare shake-up is a part of Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany's wider economic reforms aimed at cutting back the role of the state - and the most bitterly contested. Parliament is expected to approve the changes later Monday. Rail workers mobilised an estimated 3,500 workers in an open-ended strike that forced cancellations on many lines.
But while the head of the Free Labour Union of Rail Workers, Istvan Gasko, said most train services had been cancelled, the state railway authority insisted that more than 50 percent of the lines were running. Media reports however said that even those trains that were running were mostly empty, as passengers had opted for other means of transport in anticipation of the strike.
Thousands of doctors and teachers also joined rail workers in limited work stoppages across Hungary, although no exact figures were available on their numbers. Unions and the main right-wing opposition Fidesz party have accused Gyurcsany of trying to dismantle the cash-strapped healthcare system, one of the pillars of the welfare state.
"This system will make the poor poorer and threatens to create a situation where only the rich will be able to afford healthcare and the poor will be left without coverage," said Tibor Navracsics, parliamentary leader of the main right-wing opposition Fidesz party.
Under the planned overhaul, the state national health insurer will be replaced by 22 regional ones in which private insurance companies will be allowed to hold stakes of up to 49 percent, with the state retaining the rest. The government has said the state will continue to guarantee universal healthcare coverage under the new system.
Supporters say it will improve the lot of patients, who currently feel obliged to give so-called "gratitude money" - essentially bribes - to unmotivated, low-paid doctors and nurses, so they can be sure of proper medical attention.
Critics argue that profit-orientated private insurance firms will not want to insure the chronically ill and the elderly, or only at far higher prices. This will create inequalities in an admittedly imperfect, but theoretically still egalitarian health system, they argue.
That is an argument that resonates with people in post-communist Hungary, where many have been disappointed by the inequalities that arose in the wake of free market reforms started 18 years ago. Last year, the government launched health and education reforms, coupled with the biggest austerity package since Hungary's transition to a market democracy in 1989. Gyurcsany argued that years of government overspending had produced a runaway public deficit threatening economic stability.
The junior party in the government coalition, the liberal and staunchly pro-market Free Democrats, has been the biggest proponent of health insurance reform. It has even threatened to quit the government if parliament rejects the bill on Monday.
Meanwhile Fidesz, which is ahead in polls, has pledged to reverse the reforms and restore the state insurance monopoly if it wins the next parliamentary elections scheduled for 2010.
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