Below is a piece by a braindead BBC reporter named Max Easterman that manages to do it all. First, after setting out a story of what (if it happened at all) can only be mass murder, he tosses in the line "we do not yet know if the Black Angel is an angel of mercy - or a psychopath."
Then, after pointing out that Hungary used to have a great health care system under "really existing socialism" and that now Hungary has life expectancy below that of Albania (!), concludes that somehow this is the fault of Communism and things can only be set right by closing hospitals! Such '90s shite.
john mage
Sunday, 18 March, 2001, 07:19 GMT
Hungary's pernicious health system
Many Hungarians believe health insurance is a waste of money
By Max Easterman in Hungary
The single photo of her that has been published shows a dark, tousle-haired, attractive girl in a school group.
The police will only call her Timea F - so the tabloids have had a field-day. From day one, she has been "The Black Angel".
We know that she cannot sleep without a teddy bear. We know she likes mushy green peas and fried meat and pancakes, and has a Labrador called Jerry.
We know - or think we know, because she is now threatening to withdraw her confession - that she "helped" up to 40 elderly patients to die.
Suspicions
Alone, on the night shift at the Nyirö Gyula Hospital in Budapest, she took pity on the pain-racked bodies of her charges, and gave them injections of morphine and potassium.
What we do not know, though, is why a lone young nurse was left with dozens of patients night after night.
Why no-one picked up any clues during post-mortems, why nobody noticed any missing drugs, why, indeed, a nurse was routinely allowed to inject her patients without supervision.
Nobody realised what was happening until a second nurse was sent onto her shift.
She became suspicious, and then the police were called in. And we do not yet know if the Black Angel is an angel of mercy - or a psychopath.
Government reaction
But the reactions of the authorities have been instructive: the hospital director set the tone of official response to the scandal by saying that it was not the fault of the hospital, that it could have happened "anywhere in Hungary".
The health minister shot back that this was nonsense - but then carefully absolved himself and his government by claiming that neither under-funding of hospitals, nor a shortage of nurses was in any way to blame.
So, as the politicians and bureaucrats duck and weave and run for cover, the relatives of the many scores of people who died on the Black Angel's watch over the last two years are left wondering if their loved ones were among her victims.
Many of them were cremated, so that is another unknown to add to the lengthening list.
Collapse
What is known is that Hungary's health services, and especially its hospitals, are staggering towards collapse.
The government is spending less of its GDP on health care now, than five years ago.
Nurses with 10 years on the wards earn £150 a month - a consultant with double that experience gets about £400.
So it is not surprising that doctors are leaving to go and work for drug companies and that nurses prefer the tedium of the well-paid supermarket check-out to the bustle of the over-stretched surgical ward.
Nor is it a surprise that those doctors and nurses who stay, are happy to accept what is called pocket-money or gratitude money - a payment from a grateful patient for an operation well done, and after-care well given.
Except that it is now so institutionalised that patients know they have to pay it, willy- nilly, and the medical staff expect it, and, indeed, depend on it.
It is what pays for the Audi in the doctors' car park, and for the rent and travel costs of those nurses who do not want to live on top of the job.
But it is a pernicious system: it allows the government - and the local authorities that run the hospitals - to avoid paying more than subsistence salaries.
It drives the best doctors out of specialisms where they do not meet their grateful public - like diagnostics, and intensive care - and into areas like surgery and gynaecology, where they do.
'Waste of money'
Worst of all, perhaps, it has conditioned Hungarians into believing health insurance is a waste of money. They will "pay on the day". And that is undermining the whole health care system.
I spent an evening on the Intensive Care ward at the Heim Pál Children's Hospital, with the Senior Consultant, Csába Szentirmai.
Mr Szentirmai is all you hope for in a children's hospital: a soft-spoken, dedicated, unflappable man, with a great sense of humour. Which he needs.
As I arrived, so did an 8-year old who required kidney dialysis. The hospital cannot afford its own machine, and Mr Szentirmai was calling in a private firm to provide it.
The boy would have to wait nearly an hour for it to arrive.
What equipment the ward does have, is mostly well beyond its use-by date.
Mr Szentirmai should have 21 nurses on his ward - he has 11, and that is fine, because last year he was down to five.
Duty hours
As we struggled through melting snow across the courtyard to the mother and baby wing, he explained that he was on duty for 24 hours, and then would have to go straight into another shift - 32 hours without a break.
If he works over 60 hours a week, he will get £360 a month. And what about "gratitude money"?
He grinned: "We do not get much of that here If I were a surgeon in an adult hospital, I would at least double my salary. But it is curious, really, parents don't want to pay for their children's operations the way they will pay for their own."
Hungary used to have one of the best health care systems in the Soviet Bloc. But it was designed for a different world, a world of infectious diseases and child mortality, which it combated with great success.
But it down-graded GPs and preventive care - so much so, that Hungary now has the worst life expectancy in the industrialized world - lower even than Albania.
Its hospitals need modernising, and some must be closed down. There are just too many. Primary care and clinics need expanding.
It is a task that needs money and political grit - both are commodities that seem in very short supply just now.
Meanwhile, the public are transfixed with the minutiae of the Black Angel's personal life - whilst the shortcomings of the system that allowed her to thrive are neither understood - nor debated.