The case of Ildikó Lendvai with the bedridden

Ildiko Lendvai has an opinion, he has never dared to present it to the public, his publicisms are regularly read in the columns of Népszava, Mandiner also reviews them, why wouldn't he? the purpose of the former is to harass opposition readers, and the latter to harass the pro-government camp. If nothing else, Ms. Lendvai's notes, devoid of any moral basis, but marked by demagoguery, are really good for that.

Last week, in his article entitled "The country is lying down", he scrutinized the social law amendment - a law charmingly called "Lex Megdöglesz" in opposition circles, in an article that flashed the clinical symptoms of amnesia, with such outrageous claims as "in state and municipal nursing homes the waiting list only moves forward on the basis of cruel extinction”. As far as I know, places are also released in private institutions on a "cruel extinction" basis, after which it is difficult to imagine operation in any other institution with a fixed capacity. But why bother with such trifles, when you can put such grandiose explanations on paper as

 "if the poorer patient cannot accept the fee, he can go home. The question is whether his life comes first or his family's. Modern Taygetos, but not for babies, but for old people. But since the whole country is in a kind of National Dormant. This is the real chronic department: we have been referred to the NER for many years. He cannot improve our condition, and he clearly has no such ambition."

Well, that's enough, because reading Ildiko Lendvai, one almost calls for euthanasia - we'll come back to this later - feeling that the unprecedented social sensitivity in Hungary during the MSZP governments has now become a fog, eradicated by the evil Fidesz. Also.

 "Ensuring the conditions of social care - in addition to the responsibility of individuals for themselves and their families, as well as for the members of local communities - is the responsibility of the central bodies of the state and local governments"

– is now recorded in the second paragraph of the Act on Social Administration and Social Benefits. The government would change this with a joint bill by Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjén and Minister of the Interior Sándor Pintér, stipulating that

1. You are primarily responsible for the social security of the individual.
2. If the individual is unable to create his social security through no fault of his own, it is the duty of the next of kin to help him, in proportion to his financial means and personal ability.
3. If the individual's livelihood cannot be ensured by himself and his relatives, the municipality of his place of residence has a duty of care.
4. Charitable organizations that receive state support are tasked with finding people who are not covered by social security and helping them to the best of their ability.
5. If the individual's social security cannot be created despite the provisions of paragraph (4), it is the state's obligation to ensure it.

The justification emphasizes that the list also indicates a sequence of care, pointing out that the state's care of needy persons is of a subsidiary nature.

In Hungarian, the law would make "official" the view that has been with us since ancient times and is as old as humanity, that a person's closest and surest resource and source of help is himself and other people. Among them are those who are closest to him: family, friends, small communities. And reciprocity always appears in the long run, as does universality: every known society and human community on the globe has functioned this way.

According to Roma expert István Forgács , who examines social care in the light of Gypsies, the new tone is both a constraint and an opportunity.

"The compulsion stems from the fact that - beyond worldview and ideological debates - the state must really calculate what and how much to spend. Under the current conditions, it is safe to stand by the approach that if you don't want to reduce family allowances next year, you will spend less in the social sector, which is considered classic, while trying to ensure that resources and new actors appear there, which in a different kind of structure and they try to help in a responsible manner."

We are also in the right place, since the cornerstones of the matter are the cost and the attitude, which are highly correlated: the attitude determines who spends or does not spend on what, be it at the individual, family, community, state, or even EU level. I quote again, this time from professor András Gerő , who is known to hold classic liberal views:

"We see that Fidesz conducts an eclectic government: its cultural policy is distinctly right-wing, its social policy is distinctly left-wing. Fidesz has amazing left-wing actions, from interest rate caps to official prices and utility reductions to tax refunds. In many respects, the current government is the most left-wing government of the period after the regime change."

In the social policy of the bourgeois government, actions are also associated with the left-wing approach, and the results are tangible, even if Ms. Lendvai prefers to ignore these results, and she tends to forget about the destruction of her own party with the same preference. The memento that can be read below, in the framed section, may even help to remember him, the founding member of the Hungarian Socialist Party, since he was the president of the Budapest party organization from 1994, then a member of parliament until 2014, and between 2002 and 2009, the faction leader of the MSZP, then its president until 2009-2010. Before that... let's leave it. Now is not the time to get involved in silly adventures.

In any case, Ildikó Lendvai was in the thick of it, this is indisputable, so perhaps we can recall one of the iconic events of the year 2007, the socially sensitive closure of OPNI, which Prof. Dr. Zoltán Rihmer remembers as follows:

"At the same time as the Lipótmező was closed, the number of psychiatric beds was reduced by nearly 25 percent nationwide, but outpatient care was not drastically improved, and its funding was even reduced by 50 percent. The admission area of ​​the closed institute (approx. 800,000 inhabitants) was distributed among the remaining psychiatric departments operating with a significantly reduced number of beds, where overcrowding increased and the patient-physician ratio, which had not been optimal until then, worsened even further. The closing of the Lipótmező is therefore only the most visible (smaller) part of the health »deform« of 2007, and it is a symbol of the negative process that started at that time and affected the entire domestic psychiatric care.

In the approach of socialist governments, cost reduction appeared as progression, as a euphemism for physical and mental destruction. And if it's progress, let's go back to euthanasia as a progressive way of cleaning up social excess, because in model democracies euthanasia is becoming an increasingly "successful" enterprise.

In Canada, the use of "medical assistance in dying" (MAID) is becoming more and more "popular", the state is ending the lives of tens of thousands with regulations relaxed to the point of absurdity - this would be the inverse of abortions.

But if we delve into the depths of human tragedies, in the vast majority of cases the cause is always of a financial nature, and for the state, institutionalized euthanasia is the most cost-effective procedure, naturally wrapped in the cloak of boundless humanity.

In his article last Saturday , Declan Leary, the editor of the American Conservative , mentions by name cases in which Canadian citizens were executed for surreal reasons. It begins with the case of 54-year-old Amir Farsoud, who, according to the official justification, was approved for MAID because of back pain, but in fact Farsoud is struggling financially, is about to lose his home, and feels that he has run out of options. He told Toronto's CityNews that he doesn't want to die at all, but he'd rather choose this path than end up on the streets.

"It is impossible to say," writes Leary, "how many of the tens of thousands of Canadian euthanasia victims were talked into the decision by death cult witch doctors or death commission bureaucrats, and how many went to their graves without their stories ever being made public." There is no doubt that the cardinal part of the problem is the budget calculation. Keeping people with chronic illnesses alive is expensive, and in a health care system like Canada's, every incentive is to limit such costs. But the expansion of the scope of MAID to people with mental illness is an even greater disgrace: starting next year, physical illness will not be necessary at all to justify euthanasia. Simple suicide becomes a state-sanctioned practice.”

And then let's quote Ms. Lendvai's high-flying line of thought again:

"If the poorer patient cannot accept the fee, he can go home. The question is whether his life comes first or his family's. Modern Taygetos, only not for babies, but for old people.”

If I didn't know who Ildikó Lendvai was, I could even believe from this passage that he was criticizing Canada, Belgium or other states that propagate the cult of death. But unfortunately, I know who he is, I know what he has done, and I also know why he writes what he writes. Piha.

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Featured image: MTI/Attila Kovács