The Crisis of Biopolitics or Biopoliticizing the Crisis? Discourses on the Problems of Socialist Healthcare in Late Socialist Hungary

From 1973, an increasing number of polemical articles appeared in different periodicals, such as Valóság (Reality), Társadalmi Szemle (Review of society), Kritika (Criticism), and Világosság (Light), emphasizing the inadequacies of healthcare. 1 The aim of these publications was to discuss how the specifics of socialist healthcare (e.g., the financial situation of state-funded institutions and professionals as state employees), individual choices (e.g., informal payments and the general provision of the technical and financial background for growing consumption), social constraints (e.g., the ethos of ability to work and socialist welfare), and changing political and professional norms (e.g., the contradictory situation of medical ethics) caused the deterioration of both the healthcare system and the population’s health. Although their arguments were sometimes rather rudimentary, their general aim was to show that what initially appeared to be violations of socialist healthcare norms committed by doctors and patients were actually the result of complex distortions in the economic and social system. 2 While state socialism promised free, high-quality care for all citizens, its structure was already outdated by the mid-1960s: small institutions were unable to provide the increasingly specialized and technologically based medical care for the majority of patients, and no institutional improvements were made to departments dealing with increasingly prevalent problems (notably cardiovascular and psychiatric diseases).