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Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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I live in a Central European capital with worse healthcare than the US. (I have lived in both countries and have elderly relatives living under state funded healthcare in both systems.)
First, there’s a big difference between cities in both places. I could believe that if you compare California to Bratislav, but Oklahoma to Vienna would already be a different matter.
And in any case, it depends how much worse it was. In the US, even if it’s “state funded”, you have to pay for it, and quite a lot. Chances are if you went to a private clinic in Central Europe paying that same amount of money you could’ve gotten the same, if not better treatment.
I might as well just say it, I'm mostly comparing Louisville, KY and Los Angeles to Prague, Czech Republic and a midsized city in Poland. I have relatives who travel to the US for treatment because at least in CZ the elder care in hospitals is abusive/negligent.
Edit: To clarify I've lived in Kentucky and Czech Republic, but spend a lot of time in Poland and Los Angeles because of family/personal ties.
I mean, I can believe public hospitals in Prague not being top-notch, but flying to America to get treatment seems surreal. Like, that’s a lot of money and I can’t believe for that amount they couldn’t find a private to do it better in CZ or at least in Germany.
I haven’t personally been in America so you’re probably more knowledgeable than me under that aspect, but from all the shit I’ve read online I don’t get why should anyone from Europe go get treatment there instead of a Scandinavian country.
There probably are people that could treat her well in Europe, but I think the issue would be getting her treated in a country she's not a resident of, and doesn't have insurance in. She has a condition that the Czech state insurance refuses to treat because of her age. It's possible other European systems would be the same but I can't speak to them.
Oh that sucks. Seems like a very specific case so I guess I shouldn’t lump it in with the generic knowledge I have, sorry for talking out of my ass.
I still think a country like the US could manage with universal free healthcare, but I shouldn’t have assumed that every country that has one works just as well, you’re right.
I think the US system is very broken in pricing, but my experience in terms of quality of care and waits is that the US is very good in that regard. That's why there's a lot of medical tourism there for more extreme conditions. I'm not defending the terrible pricing structure, but the healthcare system overall is not just bad.
Well, it is one of the most developed countries in the world, it would’ve been weird if it didn’t have a lot of specialized doctors.
Other than the price though, I’ve seen a lot of people complain about long waits and surgeries (even reconstructive ones) not being “approved” by insurance companies. It’s probably skewed since people only talk about the bad experiences they’ve had, but just the fact that they can do that seems crazy to me.
I've never heard people complain about US waits to the level of Canada, or much of Europe. But yeah the insurance thing is that they will only cover treatments necessary to health (usually, but some others may be mandatory minimums now).
I can’t find the ones I saw before, but just searching “insurance” here brings results like this or this which are actual horror stories (both the ones in the posts and the ones in the comments).
It seems to me that queue issues are the same everywhere, with the difference that in the US you pay to wait. I’m glad your experience was different and I’m sure not everyone goes through that stuff, but the fact that it happens at all is pretty dystopic to me.
In small towns yes there are problems with waits sometimes of course, in my opinion this is largely due to anti-competitive laws like certificate of need and due to the strictest licensing requirements in the world. Also, urgent care waits usually aren't bad. As for whether a place is covered by your insurer, yeah that's pretty annoying, but there is a reason insurers don't cover certain things from certain providers- the insurer doesn't want to pay exhortationate fees just like an uninsured patient would have to so negotiate the cost with the providers ahead of time, and if they don't reach an agreement they can't pay for it.
I don’t know what the standard is in the US, but to me 80k is definitely not “a small town”. Like, here in Italy we only have 66 cities with more people than that. Someone in an 80k city not finding a gastroenterologist to visit him in three months within 1 and a half hour of driving seems absurd to me.
If having private healthcare causes all these issues with insurance I think it’s really not worth it at this point. I don’t think the quality of the service would decline either since even in free healthcare countries doctors earn a lot and are a coveted job.