EPSU letter of support: Letter to the Prime Minister of Hungary

Dear Prime Minister,

Complaint by our affiliate EDDSZ regarding Health Sector Privatisation

The European Federation of Public Service Unions, (EPSU) which unites over 8 million members of public sector trade unions throughout Europe, received information from its affiliate EDDSZ concerning the privatisation plans for the Hungarian Health Sector. The union has informed EPSU about the proposals.

In particular EPSU deplores the proposals to:

  turn the currently existing public institution into a business enterprise interested only in financial profit and initiate a process that will lead to an overall privatization of medical attendance and services;
  eclipse the human beings and their health instead of putting them in the centre, leaving health policy and the peoples health actually untouched in the reform proposal;
  destroy solidarity as a crucial element of the health system and thereby also disregarding that the EU has denounced the existing wide health inequities within and between their 27 member countries in the impact assessment of the white paper on health as avoidable and unfair and showed Hungary as a country with most unfavorable conditions: compared with Italy, where men live 71 Healthy Life Years (HLY) the figure for Hungary is only 53 HLY.

EPSU deplores this blatant disregard of for fundamental EU principles by an EU Member State Government. These privatisation plans are especially unwelcome, as they come on the eve of the signing of the EU REFORM TREATY, which includes the provision (in the charter of fundamental rights, in Article 35 ‘Health Care’) that;

‘Everyone has the right of access to preventive health care and the right to benefit from medical treatment under the conditions established by national laws and practices. A high level of human health protection shall be ensured in the definition and implementation of all Union policies and activities’.
EPSU is at one with EDDSZ in condemning your Governments proposals on health care privatisation, and believe that they will undermine the fundamental EU principles of solidarity, universality and accessibility of health care provision.

The European Federation of Public Service Unions supports the requirements of the EDDSZ and asks the government of Hungary to withdraw these plans as soon as possible.

Carola Fischbach Pyttel

General Secretary