Election 2018 – LMP promises comprehensive wage rises to health care workers

The opposition LMP party has promised comprehensive wage increases to workers employed in the health-care sector.

Speaking at a press conference in Budapest on Friday, Júlia Ábrahám, a member of the party’s national board, said there was no reason why Hungarian doctors and nurses should earn even less than their colleagues in other eastern European countries.

“Let us be bold and try to catch up with Slovakia,”

she said, pledging that if LMP came into power after the election, they would instantly raise the wages of health-care employees by 50 percent while also increasing the allowances of people working in the sector for the duration of the following five years.

Ábrahám said governments in the past decades had only allocated the minimum level of resources to the health-care sector. Accordingly, Hungarians pay the most for medical treatment from their own pocket in Europe, and Hungary tops the list in terms of the proportion of cancer deaths in the European Union, she said.