Outpatients. Sasha Issenberg
achievement in the field of Olympic medals and Nobel prizes may be the man usually identified simply as the prime minister’s dentist.
Béla Bátorfi’s rise to fame can be traced to the 2010 return of the conservative Fidesz party after eight years of Socialist Party dominance. Bátorfi, then forty-one years old, had a thriving practice in a posh residential corner of Buda with a clientele that included an impressive slice of the Budapest political elite. Among his longtime clients was the new prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who had been his patient for almost twenty years. Orbán developed a reputation for ruthlessly punishing opponents and rewarding supporters, naming Fidesz loyalists to posts in the central bank and office of the chief prosecutor—departments that had been previously immune to partisan politics. “‘Orbán is putting his people everywhere,’ is a constant lament in Budapest,” the Economist itself lamented early in his term. Even the man who tended to the first family’s teeth stood to benefit.
Bátorfi is indeed a specialist in oral surgery, with a dental degree from his country’s most celebrated medical college, Semmelweis University, and a masters from the University of Münster in Germany. But when his name appears in Hungarian newspapers it is rarely in direct connection to his proficiency with a drill or scalpel. Most frequently, Bátorfi is covered as a subject of political intrigue. When, in his second year in office, Orbán invited dental businesses to bid for a series of government tenders, Bátorfi entered and ultimately won everything for which he appeared to be eligible. (“It is possible to get the money through a complex application, but inevitably Viktor Orbán’s dentist’s company will be awarded the billion forints,” the news website Origo had predicted before one such grant process was complete.) Over the first four years of Orbán’s administration, 3 billion forints in contracts and state aid (equal to roughly 10 million dollars) have flowed from the federal government of Hungary to a congeries of companies and trade associations under Bátorfi’s influence. “Bátorfi has been Orbán’s dentist since 1992,” László Szűcs, a Bátorfi adviser, told the news magazine Heti Világgazdaság, defending his client’s right to bid for government tenders that he would eventually win. “Why wouldn’t he enter into a competition when any other business could compete?”
That sense of infinite possibility now infuses nearly everything Bátorfi does. He also chairs his own eponymous athletic club, based in the northeastern city of Eger, and presides over the Budapest Ironman competition as president of the Hungarian Triathlon Union. “He is expanding into the entertainment business, and could open a famous club in Eger with municipal or state assistance, or take part in a planned real-estate development,” Heti Világgazdaság reported in the summer of 2014.
The patients responsible for the wealth amassed by the Bátorfi Dental Implant Clinic, however, were unlikely to have ever read about any of its proprietor’s political, sporting, or entrepreneurial exploits. Instead, they knew him only as the studious dentist with an unusually high number of advertisements in London media. “The proof of his work and competence are the more than 35,000 patients he has treated. Dr. Bátorfi is honest and always ready to share his knowledge and expertise with his patients,” declared an ad that Bátorfi placed in The Times to promote a clinic that he had branded the British-Hungarian Medical Service. “What he lacked in bedside manner he made up for with efficiency,” a travel writer for the Telegraph wrote about a series of 2007 visits to Budapest for implant surgery, noting that by his second visit Bátorfi’s “communication skills had not progressed much beyond the ‘open now’ and ‘close now’ level, and his fast fingers seemed fatter than before.”
Unlike Orbán, Bátorfi’s patients from abroad typically saw the clinic’s self-described master implantologist only once or twice, if ever. Much as luck had once placed a promising young parliamentarian into his dental chair years before he would make good in politics, a fortuitous connection had introduced Bátorfi to the practice of medical tourism years before the phrase meant much of anything to anyone.
In 2000, a Hungarian based in England had approached Bátorfi with a proposal. If he could persuade Brits to take advantage of cheap and available Hungarian dental work, would the dentist share with him a cut of the new business?
Bátorfi got a license to practice in the UK and rented an office in London. To Bátorfi’s surprise, the patients started coming, adventurous types willing to confront the unfamiliar in search of prices that—even with all travel expenses included—typically fell below half of what they might pay in Bristol or Belfast. “In the beginning, that an English dentist would recommend a Hungarian dentist was unbelievable,” Bátorfi marvels today.
He was nimble enough to reorient his practice to satisfy the new business. Recognizing that foreign customers would be most likely to travel for expensive treatments where they could realize the greatest savings, Bátorfi chose to pursue his masters in implantology, which includes some of oral surgery’s most complex procedures. Back in Budapest, he began setting his prices in British pounds and offering free chauffeur pickup at the airport. Bátorfi spent $150,000 per year on marketing, in addition to other extravagant gestures. About a decade ago, Bátorfi spent approximately $200,000 to acquire four pieces of equipment that László Szűcs calls “the Rolls-Royce of dental chairs.” Szűcs claims that there are only four other existing versions of the same model, manufactured by the Japanese company Morita: one owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin, one by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and two by a private Swedish clinic.
Since then, Bátorfi—who appears year-round with a tan that gives the impression that he has uncovered a secret yacht passage from the Danube to the Mediterranean—has become the perfectly bronzed face of one of the most unexpectedly shimmering sectors of Hungary’s post-communist economy. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of per-capita dentists in Hungary increased by 56 percent. Many of them were eager to follow Bátorfi into the increasingly well-defined sphere known as medical tourism, in which patients travel to another country with the primary purpose of securing treatment. Hungary has more dentists per head of population than any other country, according to London journalist David Hancock, who in 2006 wrote a guide for British patients called The Complete Medical Tourist. “And since the country joined the European Union their fellow Europeans have had plenty to smile about, too, because prices are considerably cheaper there than in neighboring countries like Austria and Germany,” Hancock wrote. “No wonder Hungarians smile a lot!”
Not everyone was smiling about Hungarian dentistry’s international profile. The country had struggled since the end of its communist era to deliver quality health coverage within a market economy to all its citizens. To those, particularly within rural areas, the fact that the most lucrative part of Hungarian health care was a gaudily extravagant sector that existed largely to serve foreigners’ vanities appeared to be a failure of government, a moral abomination.
By the time Orbán became prime minister, medical tourism had become widely accepted by policymakers as unique tool for economic development. Its promise was almost magical: tourism for countries that had not been gifted with beaches or mountains, or had lacked the good sense millennia ago to preserve their abandoned stone structures for future sightseeing purposes.
When his patient and friend became head of government, Bátorfi’s language began to shift from speaking of his own five-chair dental clinic as the dominant center of commerce to talking about his country of 10 million as a whole. He began to contemplate the ways that medical tourism had converted his own business from a diverse family-oriented dental practice to a high-value oral-surgery outfit, and whether the dominant market position he had assumed could be extrapolated into a type of national comparative advantage. A 2010 study by the country’s central tax bureau estimated that the 60,000 dental tourists who traveled to Hungary each year generated 65 billion forints (about $250 million) in revenue for dentists, with another 13 billion forints or $5 million in ancillary spending on hotels and restaurants. The sector had survived the recession, and business showed little sign of slowing. After all, the peculiar dynamics that brought people to Bátorfi’s London clinic for consultations and onward to Budapest for surgery—a British health system that made certain types of medical care scarce, or costly, or both—weren’t likely to yield anytime soon. “There are few things in which Hungary is in a leading position, and dental tourism is the one,”