Outpatients. Sasha Issenberg

suggested a process driven by the desire to make an example of him, or possibly even a personal vendetta. Charges of malpractice were based on the testimony of a patient who had, five years earlier, traveled to Budapest for implant surgery and were sketchy about specifying actual damages. (Bátorfi was alleged to have given insufficient advance information about the treatment plan and, after the patient expressed dissatisfaction with the procedure, had not responded to follow-up queries about options for corrective treatment.)

      A month later, after an appeal, the suspension was rescinded, but not before the prime minister’s dentist had been elevated into a national symbol of Hungary’s ability to put wealthier countries on the defensive.

      That year, Hungary’s Medical Tourism Office, which Bátorfi as director operates as his vehicle for designing a national strategy, organized a dental tourism conference in Budapest, at which Orbán’s government signed a cooperation agreement with the sector and announced its first billion-forint grant. “A worthy and good investment,” Orbán said there. The financial commitment was a bet that medical tourism was more than a fad—that what had very quickly shown Hungary to be effective at luring travelers to seek medical care there wasn’t just the consequence of a few talented dentists emerging at the right time, or of Bátorfi’s preternatural instinct for entrepreneurialism. Had Hungary made itself good at something that would last?

      After officially winning the public contract to determine how that “worthy and good investment” would be spent, Bátorfi turned to yet another one of his patients for help. László Szűcs was a communications consultant based in Budapest whom Bátorfi had informally asked for marketing advice in between visits to the dental chair for years, before asking him to serve as CEO of the Medical Tourism Office. When Bátorfi had first put Szűcs on his payroll, in 2009, Szűcs was in Napa Valley, working on a short documentary about Croatian-American winemaker Mike Grgich, whose Chateau Montelena Chardonnay famously won the 1976 Judgment of Paris competition, establishing California wines as a formidable product with a distinct identity in the global marketplace. Szűcs and Miklos Rózsa, a business consultant whom Bátorfi was able to pay with European Union funds acquired through Orbán’s government, began thinking about their product in similar terms.

      “Our aim is,” Rózsa says, “‘in Switzerland, you get chocolates and watches. In Hungary, you get dentistry.’”