One closed private infertility clinic would receive 60 million in compensation from the government

The government would recommend HUF 59,516,000 in compensation to the closed private infertility clinic, Versys Clinics, reports Hvg.hu. Although Versys offered itself to the state for purchase last summer, the government rejected it, so the institute’s operating license was terminated on June 30 of last year.

Among the drafts submitted for social debate, the decree that establishes the level of state compensation for the Human Reproduction Institute Kft. (that is, Versys Clinics) has appeared in the past few days.

The large-scale nationalization of infertility centers began before Christmas 2019, when the government announced that it would take over six private infertility clinics and make treatments, screenings, and drugs free. The explanation was that the government wants to help the 150,000 couples struggling with infertility, so infertility treatments will be cheaper, faster and accessible to everyone in the future.

As part of the process, the infertility department of the Róbert Károly Private Hospital was taken over by the state, but the National Laboratory of Human Reproduction was established with a HUF 2.5 billion state grant.

According to last year’s decree of the Parliament, from July 1, 2022, implantation can only be performed at state infertility clinics. The government justified this by saying that it is more efficient if the reproduction procedures are taken over by the state, because it has a significant financial impact, and they also saw that there were abuses. The justification for the law also states that “Demographic challenges in Hungary require state involvement”, so the government wants to see more children.

Based on the amendment of the adopted bill, the private clinics had to hand over these institutions to the state, together with the embryos and gametes stored in them – in exchange for compensation.

The extent of this is determined by Márton Nagy, the minister responsible for the supervision of state assets.

Since the banning of private clinics, it has become clear that despite nationalization, the effectiveness of Hungarian IVF treatments has decreased: according to government data, while between 2017 and 2019 more than 19 percent of the treatments carried out each year resulted in a child, in 2020 it was only 17.9 percent, and in 2021 and in , it decreased even further to 16.6 percent.

Three women previously told Telex about their experiences of what the state flask program is like from the inside and how they experienced the reorganization.