ABSTRACT
The main purpose of this chapter is to contribute to revealing relationships between a population’s health status, the health care system and socioeconomic and political factors under state socialism. Both the state-socialist regime and the current transitional period in Hungary should be understood as specific types of socio-economic development. The chapter describes some basic tendencies; however, fundamental questions remain unanswered. It cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of concrete processes, through which deteriorating health status and characteristics of the state-socialist regime might be connected. The alarming deterioration in health status in recent years in many Eastern European countries may be interpreted as part of the failure of the state-socialist type of modernization, based on the fact that similar tendencies can be observed in a number of former state-socialist countries.
