- Together with Attila Steiner, you announced that under the Jedlik Ányos Program, you will be able to renovate healthcare buildings using 88–90 billion forints.
- Essentially, this is an energy-focused investment where we must aim for energy efficiency, so that healthcare institutions — primarily hospitals and ambulance stations — spend less on utility costs. Naturally, the money saved can later be used to improve patient care.
But there’s also a typically “Hungarian” criticism here: there is this thing called the RRF, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, where a rather substantial amount — around 900 billion forints — was allocated to healthcare development, and part of it should have been used for hospital renovations. Fifty hospitals and thirty-one ambulance stations were on the list. Yet, as we know, our political opponents are blocking these funds for political reasons.
So I came up with the idea: if the EU doesn’t give us the money from one pocket, then we’ll simply take it from the other pocket of the Brussels bureaucrats. And I brought this proposal to Minister Lantos — to send a little jab — that if we don’t get it from one place, we’ll take it from another. And in this energy-efficiency envelope, which has been opened to Hungarians — thanks to the Prime Minister — we can tap into a sizable EU fund. With that, we will now be able to renovate exactly those 50 hospitals and about 20 ambulance stations that were originally on the list.