Ask Lemmy

apparently dental care is quite expensive in some countries despite covering for healthcare that isnt teeth. just for context, in some areas in states, west coast. i had limited x-ray exam on tooths that were hurting it was around several hundred outofpocket, no insurance. seems inidvidual insurance is alot worst for dental than an employer negotiated one.

and that xray isnt looking at your whole mouth. all bets are off on cost if your tooth needs rootcanal, crowns,,,etc. apparently molars are more expensive compared to front teeth for rootcanal and crowns. RTC itself(not including xray or general workup) can be 1-2k per teeth, doesnt include temp crowns. definitely have to shop around if your insurance doesnt pay for it, or a specific clinic cost too much.

We pay 25 usd ish per doctors appointment in Norway. With a cap of 300 or something.

Some medication you’ll have to pay for. But it’s pretty heavily subsidised.

But like when my wife gave birth, we paid nothing

Canada here. I'm very thankful for it. I don't think I'd survive if I had to individually pay.

Aus.

I'm waiting for minor surgery. Basically every 6 months or so they make me come to the hospital to talk to a nurse or doctor or whatever, it's pretty pointless. Ends with them saying "yep you need surgery" then I go back to waiting. No idea when I'll actually get it done, should be any year now.

If I got private insurance I'd have to wait a year before cashing out, so I'm fine not paying anything and waiting a bit longer. If I had known I'd be waiting as long as I have I might have opted for private, but there isn't any solid timeline given for waiting times.

Everything outside of that is quick and easy. Go to gp, get referral, see specialist. No roadblocks at all, but the specialists likely cost a couple hundred bucks. Medication is pretty cheap, usually $10-20 for a month's supply of anything you need.

Norway - I think the basic way you and me think about anything health related are so vastly different, its hard for each of us to comprehend the others mindset.

You can do things for free or cheap but some things have so long waiting times, that you opt for private doctors, which can be somewhat cheap, at least in comparison with the US and because there is "competition" with the public system.

Italy here.

It's great to have it, and as I see what happens around the world I understand how nearly utopian-like the concept is.

... but people will complain and moan about it anyway, and the main reason is that:

• while being universal every different region (20 in italy) has its own locally administered and budgeted subsystem implementation which ~~might~~ will differ from the next region system and so patients data won't be able to be transferable or even observable from each different region network
  Also the level of cures you receive might vary in their quality from region to region

• it is understaffed because the salary is not worth the responsibilities, unless you get to be a specialist doctor, so for instance there are not nearly enough nurses or sometimes triage doctors, and so many workers have to go through extenuating working hours schedules to cover missing work force, and of course this will affect their performance and even send someone into burnout

• it is understaffed because it is underbudgeted, and this is by design by politicians, ultimately run by right-wingers since some decades already, who are trying to give the people more and more reason to hate the public health system, so one day they might be able to succeed to sell all the public (paid with peoples taxes) infrastructures to privates, transforming the public health system into the "american dream" health system

• it is underbudgeted because taxes here are paid for the 70% of the total by employees and by retired people, which constitutes but a glimpse of the personal profits of the total, while every one with an autonomous job, including companies, just fuck with taxes, year after year, in a systematic and systemic way, so much that every new government will indict a new taxation amnesty because the budget needed to go after the unpaid taxation is more than the taxation not earned.
  ...oh yeah and then after that the same politician will complain and moan about the public health system being inefficient and needing a privatization reform.

Canadian. I have a chronic issue that I wait long times to see a specialist. Mainly because after seeing them for a few visits to update treatment, I don't see them for a couple years but can't immediately go back because I need to be re-referred which can take awhile due to waitlists. But I can see my GP (in person or phone call) very quickly if needed and all free. I had a serious issue not long ago and got seen in Urgent Care in a couple hours (avoided ER), sent to specialist next day, and got all the testing done quite quickly and then treated - less than a week. No cost. Might have been a bit quicker in a pay system but my life wasn't threatened and I didn't have to worry about whether or not it would be covered by my insurance or what the copay would be. I know people who complain about the slowness of non life threating issues but they always have the option of paying for care - they just need to leave Canada, and some do. I have a relative who was ticked that the surgeon he saw wouldn't recommend an operation so he went to the US and paid to have it done only to find that it didn't really solve his problem (just like his 'idiot' Canadian doc had said) and he was now out a load of money and still had a chronic issue. For life threatening issues, all my family and friends have had timely & free service. An aunt went into ER 2 weeks ago for severe stomach pain. Got a CT and was into surgery a day later. Five days in hosptial and she's now recovering at home with occassional health nurse visits. No charge. Didn't even have to pay for most of her medication costs because they were mostly covered under Pharmacare.

I have lived in several countries so I can give you a few answers:

Brazil:

You have two options, private which is generally expensive but fast and good and public which is free but usually slow and mediocre. Most people who can afford it use private, but public system is honestly quite good in some places. I lived in two different cities, on one of them you didn't go to the public system unless it was an absolute emergency, because otherwise chances were you would come out worse, on the other city the public system was slow and under budgeted but very good otherwise, you would still prefer private if you could afford it, but people tight on money would use it, so you might do time insensitive stuff on the public system for example.

If you break your leg you would call an ambulance, get taken to a public hospital and be treated all free. You might have to wait on the hospital as people with graver injuries would be taken ahead of you.

Ireland:

There is a public system, but you have to earn below a certain threshold to be able to use it. Emergencies I think are covered for everyone, luckily I never had an emergency while living there so can't speak from experience. You MUST have a GP, and most of them (at least in Dublin) are not taking new patients. Once you find a GP you must go through them to get to any specialist, for that you pay €60 and then you go to a consultation with them and they can decide whether to forward you to a specialist or not. If they forward you to a specialist you will have to pay their consultation fee, then pay for any exams, they pay to see the specialist again. All-in-all I've spent around €1000 trying to get a diagnosis once, luckily I had health insurance and it paid me back half.

Spain:

My wife twisted her ankle while visiting here as tourists, someone called an ambulance, it took us to the hospital, and after some wait se was seen and they did an x-ray, confirmed nothing was broken and gave her some special socks to prevent the joint from forcing too much. Because we forgot to bring our sanitary card from Ireland we had to pay for that, it was a total of €200.

We live here now, and since moving here a couple of years back we have gone through dozens of doctors and exams. I have a health plan from my company so this might not be the same for everyone, but I have never paid a single cent for anything, including X-rays, blood works, CAT scans, etc. Honestly I keep thinking at some point I will receive a huge bill from the health plan, but so far it has never happened.

I'm at the doctor right now here in Australia

Paid nothing. Paid nothing for my tests too

I'm never sure how to answer this because the concept of universal healthcare being a debate is strange to me, often it seems to coincide with "free" healthcare debates but the two seem quite different to me. Isn't healthcare universal in countries like the US too? The problem being rather that it will bankrupt your family for 3 generations if you have to actually use it unless your employer values you staying alive instead of using the threat of death and disease as leverage to make you work harder for less pay. But that's more a problem of universal insurance rather than universal healthcare itself, right? Anyone could still get treated if they accept the financial consequences. The system sucks, but still seems universal to me (again, universal insurance is the problem).

It's not free over here, but everyone needs to have health insurance, and you get some subsidies to pay for it if you have a very low income. After a few decades of neoliberalism the subsidies are not sufficient, there's an amount each year that you have to pay yourself, and hospitals are permanently nearly overwhelmed. But the financial amounts are much smaller compared to what someone in the US would be faced with (150-200 euros/month insurance, max 450 euros/year you have to pay yourself). There are waiting lists but despite memes I've seen of "yeah it's more affordable in Europe but they never get treatment due to waiting lists", I've never had to wait for actually urgent care, stuff I could do any time had some wait time but nothing crazy (few weeks, rarely 1-2 months for very in-demand optional stuff), and I believe overworked hospitals with crazy waiting lists are still much worse in (some) American hospitals compared to here. But I'm basing that off tv shows and movies where people have to wait for hours in the emergency department, not sure how realistic that is. By the way visits to the GP are free and I've never had to wait more than a day for an appointment. When I had something more serious I could stop by the GP instantly regardless of the appointment schedule.

Basically if you compare it to the situation a few decades before it's worse, and some other European countries have better systems IMO. Compared to the US, which is the only country I know of where universal VS non-universal health care is a topic of debate, i can't think of a single dimension in which it is not an upgrade, perhaps with the exception of shareholder profits (but even then a full economic argument wouldn't work based on that, because sick or dead citizens don't work very well).

Netherlands