Who here has actually HAD European style socialized health care?

[CTyankee]

I've never had to avail myself of the health care systems of any of the European countries I've ever visited. I hear good stories about Americans who have and they are all very positive.

Any DUers have one of those experiences you'd like to share...

[HipChick]

1. what would you like to know? I had NHS care for 25yrs..

but I wait longer here to see a dr..

[eleny]

2. I believe that Thom Hartmann talked about having care when he was in Germany

He talks about it from time to time on his radio program.

[Mass]

3. WHat do you want to know? I lived in France for years. Two of my kids were born there.

One of them had to stay one month in the hospital, the other one three months. ZERO cents to pay.

You pay payroll taxes according to your income and other revenues are also taxed above a certain level (dividends, interests, ...). For usual care, you get to pay around 30 % copay, but remember that prices are about 5 to 10 times lower than here and many of them are fixed with the government and people expect low prices, so copays are small, and free for people with low income. Long term diseases like high blood pressure, cancer, and diabetis are fully covered. Other people can buy complementary insurances at relatively low prices. The only thing that is not really well covered is eyes and teeth prosthesis. This is really where additional insurance is useful.

Also, I never had to wait for a long time to see a doctor, or at least no longer than here.

I would also want to say that, while the GOP complains about the cost of medical malpractice insurances, one other element that is important is that college tuitions in France are mostly public and very low, so doctors do not have to reimburse high student loans. Curious how they insist on fixing one aspect, but not the other. :sarcasm:

[CTyankee]

5. Thanks. Do you straighten people out when they tell you Americans wouldn't like

European style health care?

We need truth tellers!

[truebrit71]

4. Me. It was just fine. Much easier to get in to see a Doc. My Uncle fared even better...

...a few years ago he had a stroke of some sort, lapsed into a coma, was out for the better part of two and a half weeks in hospital, finally fully recovered, paid ZERO for any of it.

But yeah, socialized medicine is bad... :eyes:

[sabrina 1]

6. My family in Europe all have access to

government provided health care. Ireland and England are where most of them are. It doesn't seem to be something they worry about much. Iow, if they need to go the doctor, they don't worry that they might lose their home if they should get very sick. Also, they are freer to move from one job to another without considering health care. So, they focus more on the job. Of course, they take all this for granted so don't see it as anything they don't have a right to. They also have the option to buy into private insurance companies.

Most are shocked by the US health care system and feel more appreciative of their own by comparison, even if they have some complaints.

[HuckleB]

7. Which European style?

There are many.

[CTyankee]

30. I meant any one that a DUer might have had experience with.

Such as, surgery or emergency care or physical therapy or just ordinary primary care, whatever.

I think we should talk about this to tamp down all this stupid talk about socialized medicine. It's stupid. Americans don't know crap about how so-called socialized medicine actually transpires in European (and many other) countries all over the world. We are so ignorant...

[Ozymanithrax]

8. I had something far better for 20 years...

I enjoyed the only Single Payer health system operated by the U.S. Government while serving in the Navy. I got sick, I went to the doctor, they took care of it. My family got sick, I took them to the doctor, they took care of it. Best system I ever worked with. Everybody should have it. Of course, the pay was lousy, the working hours terrible, long separations from my family unbearable, and being shot at by unfriendly people, frightening.

Nothing in life is free.

[Ozymanithrax]

9. I had something far better for 20 years...

I enjoyed the only Single Payer health system operated by the U.S. Government while serving in the Navy. I got sick, I went to the doctor, they took care of it. My family got sick, I took them to the doctor, they took care of it. Best system I ever worked with. Everybody should have it. Of course, the pay was lousy, the working hours terrible, long separations from my family unbearable, and being shot at by unfriendly people, frightening.

Nothing in life is free.

[Fuzz]

10. My relatives from Germany and England always complain about it

but when you boil it down, it's usually a complaint about a bad doctor. Something that happens here all the time too.

[paulsby]

11. I have - in costa rica

quality of care was excellent. cost was nothing.

my only dissapointment was that the extremely hawt nurse did not give me a long sponge bath :)

[Joe Chi Minh]

12. Sounds like it's Costa Rica or Cuba that should set up a School of the Americas.

Wouldn't be quite the same, admittedly....

[paulsby]

13. costa rica has NOTHING in common with cuba

except maybe a spanish speaking populace.

and nice weather...

and stuff like that.

cuba is run by a one party dictator, and is a repressive country.

costa rica is a democracy and citizens actually have rights, redress etc.

sure they both have socialized medicine, but socialized medicine is not at all incompatible with totalitarian govt's.

[Joe Chi Minh]

35. So totalitarian governments are not all bad then, are they? Or don't the lives of

poor people count?

Something very bad and shameful on the part of the right must have occured in Costa Rica for that to have occurred in reaction.

[WT Fuheck]

14. very positive experiences in Canada and in the UK.

Also an excellent, though very minor, experience in Norway.

[fascisthunter]

15. I Was Fortunate While in Germany

I have family there and was allowed to use my half-brother's socialized plan. I was in and out in 20 minutes. I got prescribed medicine and was fine. My experience has been a really good one.

I could go on with stories of my family using their current system... they never have to sweat over taking care of their health. When they hear shit from me about healthcare, they almost get sickened to think our government would allow such a thing to ever happen.

Having the healthcare they have brings stress down and makes people more pleasant and productive. Yes, the very thing corporate America has been trying to deny, because after all, they can take advantage of piss poor people in a third World country to do the work for peanuts.

[anigbrowl]

16. I grew up with and have worked in it

This was in Ireland. I also have several family members who have occupied senior (very senior) clinical and management roles.

It's a good thing, I have no hesitation in saying that. It works well, most of the time. but there are a number of caveats - not deal-breakers, but things you need to be aware of.

a) it costs money. Tax rates where I come from are a lot higher than here, and that means for Joe and Jill Average, not just people with big incomes. Which leads to...

b) rationing is a fact. Wide availability for the largest number of people mean that it's not always possible to meet every need, whether of urgency (small hospitals in rural areas aren't economic, so sometimes people die while travelling to larger ones) or of clinical need (you're not going to get the latest experimental treatment if the cost of providing it means many more people go without basic).

c) It's an eternal political football. When the government is the main healthcare provider, every medical failure becomes a political issue. And there are always going to be medical failures, because of incompetence, ego, limited resources, or fuckups. You can't legislate perfection, only pursue it. But you can turn every single point of failure into a referendum on the way the government does things, which results in...

d) a lot of pointless bureaucracy - not so much for patients but for the people who are trying to run the health service. When a government is getting hammered over the quality of healthcare, they can and do announce big organizational reforms, which don't necessarily improve matters much but allow them to say they're doing something, and kick the can down the road, in hope that things will sort-of improve by themselves and allow them to claim credit one or two election cycles later.

e) strikes - doctors and nurses go out on strike every so often, completely disrupting services. Sometimes they're justified, sometimes they are in it for what they can get out of it. Doctors are not necessarily altruists, but they'll certainly wear the mantle as a negotiating tactic.

f) quality is variable. Although clinical standards are pretty high overall, you can still end up with a doctor that's unhelpful or disinterested, and if your problem isn't obvious then you can waste a lot of time in the treatment of your condition. For this reason, among others, private insurance still exists (though it's much cheaper than here) and many people buy some so as to keep their treatment options open.

In short, while I'm strongly in favor of single payer or straight up nationalized health care, don't expect it to be a magic bullet. Healthcare is a personal issue and there will always be flaws and limitations in its delivery. We could cancel all wars and give Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean every last thing they asked for, and there would still be flaws and limitations.

So basically you're swapping one set of problems for a different set of problems. I think that the benefit of not having to worry about financial ruin over common but easily-treatable conditions is worth the cost but realistically I think you should anticipate doubling in your payroll (not income) taxes to pay for it, and it's not something you can bring about by just chanting 'tax the rich', no matter how much you would like to believe this is the case.

[Lars77]

19. Excellent post

I guess that is what i sort of tried to explain about Norway. There are challenges with it, but in my opinion it's better than an insuance model by miles.

[gardenista]

17. My husband is french

Whenever either of us has been in France, if we've gotten sick, we have been taken care of for free. I needed a prescription filled, got the scrip from a French doctor, went into a pharmacy, and bingo, they grabbed the bottle right away and handed it to me. No charge. I protested that I was not a French citizen, and surely owed them something. Nope.

This has backfired on us, though. During a period of unemployment with a COBRA mixup which led to us being rejected for insurance due to my pre-existing condition (having sought fertility treatment, which we paid for out of pocket, I was asked to reapply "after giving birth to a viable infant"), we were without health insurance. My husband did not understand how screwn we were, and believed that because we were healthy we would not have a prob if we went for a few months without coverage.

"If we get sick, we'll just go to France."

Enter his kidney stone episode. I asked him on the way to the hospital which airport he wanted to go to... That was mean of me, I know, and he did get good care in the US, even though we were uninsured and basically had to pass a credit check before they treated him.

$8,000 later, we now pay outrageously for COBRA, but at least we are covered.

[GreenPartyVoter]

23. Dang! My hubby had a kidney stone last year. Thank goodness we are

on Medicaid!

[gardenista]

25. Terribly terribly painful.

What was really awful about the whole thing is that the hospital waited almost TWO YEARS to bill us, after we had paid the for the emergency room doctor bill, which was separate, I guess. For a while we thought that was it, and it was not that bad, over a thousand, but not enough to break us.

Then came the hospital's bill, two years later.

[GreenPartyVoter]

26. Ugh! What a mess. I have the kind of hubby that never ever goes to the doc. He suffered terribly

for a few hours. Even drove while he was on the edge of puking and passing out!

Finally he gave in and let his dad take him to the hospital. By that time he didn't even need to stay all that long.

[gardenista]

29. Yep. same here.

Sad thing is, in this case, there was so little they could actually do for him but give him pain meds. They actually gave him morphine at first.

[GreenPartyVoter]

34. Mine came home with some sort of opiate type pill, I think. It was strong, whatever it was.

[Lars77]

18. I live in Norway

We have the second most expensive healthcare system in the world per capita - after you guys.

Why? It's complicated. To be honest i don't understand all of it myself, but we have a fully public system with a few private clinics doing specialized services. I think it's partly due to the fact that we are 4,7 million people in a long, thin, country the size of New Mexico but split in half by a big mountain range. Also, salaries for workers doing menial jobs here are very high, not to mention surgeons.

Still, i think people in general are quite happy with the system.
Here we can choose our own doctor. Everyone can assign themselves to the doctor of their choice by going online. It only takes a few minutes. Some may be unavailable because they don't have the capacity, but then you choose someone else.

If it's not an acute thing you usually get an appointment within a day or two, sometimes the same day. After the consultation, he might give you a prescription. I'm not sure about the criteria, but some drugs are subsidized by the government. Probably drugs that are used by seniors, drugs that are unusually expensive or important.

I'm on a drug right now called Metformin for Diabetes. With a subsidized prescription i payed around 10US dollars for 400 tablets of 500mg. I've found a variant of Metformin on drugstore.com, looks like the same thing. According to them the retail price for 360 500mg tablets in the US is 211 dollars!

Anyway, when I'm done at the doctors i pay a premium (sort of splitting the bill between me and the government). Usually around 30 USD (factor in that i live in a country where a big mac meal is 8-9 dollars).


One of the big arguments against this kind of system in the US is that people have to wait (and are dying) waiting for operations. This is partly true at best. Over here you may have to wait for an operation if it's not life threatening or acute. If your life is in danger you get surgery immediately unless something very unusual happens.

The waiting time for certain procedures is long, and this has created a small but growing private sector where the government will use them to decrease the waiting time. Also, employers can buy a fairly cheap insurance for their employees that will allow them to "skip the queue" and get surgery right away in the private clinics, much to the joy of the political right here.

So yeah we do have some challenges, and there is a fair amount of bureaucracy (although it rarely has any bearing on your treatment) but in my opinion these are mostly organizational or funding issues. Also, what can happen is that politicians on the right who favour privatized healthcare will cut funding for public healthcare when they are in power, only so they can point to how inefficient it is when the problems are appearing.
But here the debate is whether we should allow private hospitals and other functions to make it more efficient, it would still be single payer. NO-ONE here wants an insurance model like you have in the US.

And sometimes we do get glimpses from your healthcare debate on the news here, with Senators talking about our type of system like it's some sort of a soviet gulag where Stalin himself is using people for medical experiments.
Some people just shake their heads, others find it disturbing. Sometimes the presenter just laughs and calls in the weather guy.


Edit: Forgot to mention that for some reason dental care is only covered until you are 18 (schools usually have dentists specializing in kids). I think they cover it fully in Sweden and Denmark, but i am not sure. I had a root canal last year and payed about 1400 US. That sucks if you're poor (or a student like me).
But we can hop on a cheap flight to eastern europe and get top notch treatment for 10% of the price.

[Stinky The Clown]

20. In Rotterdam ... maybe 3 years ago ..... bad flu-like symptoms

I was directed to a doctor by the hotel

I had to pay for the cab ride to get there and back.

[jannyk]

21. Me (British), Husband (Canada) - both systems rock!! nt

[TheBigotBasher]

22. Me last year.

I caught pneumonia. I really did think I was having a heart attack. I phoned the emergency services a paramedic was out in less time than it took to put some trousers on. My heart beat was measured. I was put on oxygen.

An ambulance arrived within 10 minutes.

I was scanned, x rayed, rescanned. Given all kinds of stuff. Put on a monitoring ward.

When the x rays came back with signs of pneumonia, I was attached to more stuff. And given a course of anti-biotics. I was kept in hospital for 2 weeks. Constantly monitored.

I paid nothing for that treatment (except of course through my taxes). Not a penny. I was well cared for. had good doctors. yes it was a shared ward on the heart and lungs ward. So I saw some horrible things. If I wanted a private room, I could have gone private, however the care was excellent and I am eternally grateful to the British NHS saving my life.

A nation without a decent health care system for all can not call itself civilised.

[Violet_Crumble]

24. US citizens wouldn't be able to participate in those health-care systems...

They'd have to pay for it out of pocket or with their travel insurance. Australia OTOH has reciprical agreements with most European countries so if I travel over there I can be treated as part of their healthcare system, and if they come here they can be treated under ours and there's little to no out of pocket expenses involved. The US as far as I know doesn't have health care agreements with Australia or any of those countries because of the crap system it's got.


Anyway, we've got Medicare here and the choice to get private health cover, and I'm about to ditch my private health cover after just getting a huge bill from a doctor that the health fund won't cover and I wouldn't have been charged anything if I'd said no when they asked me if I was in a private fund...

[nadinbrzezinski]

27. I used the Israeli Medical system when I got a bum knee

It was top notch.

[wickerwoman]

28. I was in a bike accident when I was a student in Ireland.

Stupidly not wearing a helmet and hit my head on the curb hard enough that I still have a lump under my eyebrow twelve years later.

I went to casualty and got to see a doctor within 30-40 minutes. They took an x-ray, very sweetly asked vague questions to see if my boyfriend had beat me up, and then discharged me. I was there less than two hours and didn't pay a penny.

My other experience is with China where I also generally had excellent care for a fraction of what it cost in the US. Typical experience would be going to the drop-in clinic with food poisoning. Got blood tests and results right away, IV fluids, walked out with a bag full of medication for a total cost of $10-15 per visit. It wasn't much more when I got an x-ray for a stress fracture in my foot. Allergy medication that cost $25 an inhaler in the US was $1.50 and OTC in China.
Even adjusting for cost of living, I would say I paid about 1/4 of what similar health care in the US would have cost.

[ddeclue]

31. As a U.S. Army dependent I had it from birth to age 23 - it is the ONLY solution to the problem.

STOP paying doctors fee for service and give them an annual fixed salary like the rest of us and that will put a stop to a lot of this crap.

TRAIN a butt load of doctors for free and put them on the gov't payroll - that will bring down the prices in the private sector.

THAT is how you solve the health care crisis in a nutshell!

[tosh]

32. I have...as a VISITOR in England.

I was on a study trip in England when I came down with mono (glandular fever per Brits) and was hospitalized for more than a week. It didn't cost me a single pound :wow: ! The year was 1976 and it just so happened that I was there to study the NHS.

I've been a proponent of "Socialized Medicine" ever since.

[Duppers]

33. 1989 England

After arriving in Dec.'88, visiting nurse came to our flat to well-check my almost-2 yrs. old in Feb,'89. She asked all the right questions (some in US would consider this an intrusion on privacy but I was happy to answer). She listened to his heart, ck'd his ears, etc.
No charge.

Two months later, he contracted a some subdued version of whooping cough (he was already vaccinated in US and would have been MUCH worse had he not have been I was told). He was so sick that he could not keep down my breast milk or even any cola. He, therefore, became dehydrated very quickly and his fever climbed rapidly. I called the doctor on the card the nurse left me at the well-ck visit.

The doctor was at our flat within two hrs.; and because we did not have a car to get him to the hospital immediately, SHE drove us to Addenbrookes Hospital IN HER OWN CAR . The hospital staff were wonderful!! To my son and to me. After about ~30 hrs. in the hospital, he was released, and we came home in a taxi.

NO BILL ever came to our flat, as there were NO charges.

I love socialized medicine!





OBTW, I did have a dental issue while living there and was charged a minimum fee for that, which would have been double if I were in the US.

[Hannah Bell]

36. i got off a plane in london with an eye infection, went to clinic, seen immediately,

given ointment & looked at oddly when i offered to pay.

[Spider Jerusalem]

37. I have.

I'm American; my wife is British, and we live in the UK. I had a migraine, which I get from time to time, and I was puking sick from it; my wife (fiancee, as she was then) was quite worried, and rang up the NHS medical advice line, and after describing my symptoms, and being told that 'it might be meningitis', insisted I go into hospital (despite my insisting I'd be alright, that I'd had migraines before, and it would pass after a few hours to a day). So, the hospital sent an ambulance, I went in, saw a doctor, was checked out, given codeine and ibuprofen, and sent home, at no cost; in the US it would have been, probably, a few thousand, easily, and at least a grand for the ambulance alone. (And this without being either a UK citizen or legal resident at the time; I was then on a 6-month visitor visa.)

[LeftishBrit]

38. I'm British...

The NHS is one of our greatest national achievements. Maggie the Evil One weakened it but could not abolish it. We complain enough about what Maggie and Tony did to it, but it is still amazing compared with the horror stories I hear from the USA about people having to worry about whether they can afford the doctor; going bankrupt over an illness or operation; being scared to change jobs in case they lose their health insurance; etc! As someone with a 'pre-existing condition', I could probably not get affordable health insurance anywhere, so am incredibly grateful to be living somewhere where I'm not being punished for having childhood-origin health problems!