Hungary’s private health sector sees opportunity as Covid-19 snarls hospital operations

A year after COVID-19 arrived in Hungary, public hospitals have spent most of their resources fighting the virus and are currently battling its deadliest outbreak yet, unable to treat the growing numbers of people awaiting non-emergency procedures.

So with public hospitals closed to elective surgery, a quiet revolution in private health care is unfolding, led by a wave of investment in private hospitals and growth in health insurance.

Traditionally public hospitals provide the overwhelming majority of in-patient care, looking after everything from tonsillectomies to heart bypass surgery, but the pandemic has created an opportunity for existing private healthcare providers to expand and new competitors to enter the market.

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Private hospital executives interviewed by Reuters have pledged or invested 85 million euros ($100 million) in the sector: a new hospital due in the capital Budapest, taking the lion’s share of that spending, alongside a surgical ward planned in an existing facility and additional beds and upgraded equipment completed in another.

There is no publicly available data on such investments, but in the past two years only two new private hospitals were opened. Total investment is dwarfed by annual public health spending worth 4% to 5% of economic output, based on OECD figures.

Private health insurance grew by 23% last year, with some of that large increase due to relatively low market penetration according to Hungarian insurance association figures.

The average waiting time for common procedures, such as orthopaedic surgeries, has rocketed to more than a year from just 22 days based on public data from the government’s National Health Insurance Fund.

For example, the wait for a hip replacement has grown from 59 days to 406 days, for a hernia 25 days to 410 days, it said.

Emergency surgery has continued throughout the pandemic.

For Rozalia, a 41-year-old sales manager at a Hungarian company, the revolution cannot come soon enough. She had life-saving surgery to remove a tumour from her breast last summer and has since lived with a tissue expander, a temporary fix until an operation to change it to a permanent implant.

“All my doctor could say that once the halted operations restart, they will discuss when I may get mine it is not likely before the end of the summer,” she said, adding however that she cannot afford the procedure in the private sector.