Samenvatting

The central objective of this article is to examine the difficulties around getting rid of the practice of patients providing informal ‘gratitude’ payments to doctors in the Hungarian state-funded healthcare context. In many cases, the patients’ requirement to pay to access supposedly free services is communicated as a demand from the doctors’ side, which challenges the notion of ‘gratitude’. The Hungarian governments’ methods of tackling the elimination of these informal payments can be regarded as an ongoing policy fiasco, which continues to affect the healthcare system and its lay users, producing inequalities in access and in the quality of services. This article is based on twenty-eight in-depth interviews and three focus groups conducted between February 2017 and March 2019 in Budapest. The article examines how doctors and patients experience state law, as well as what they experience as law (including non-state norms), to explore the research problem through the lens of legal consciousness.