Ask Lemmy

Canadian. The hospitals are overcrowded and can be a bit dirty, but the quality of care is good and the staff do their best. The biggest problem is wait times, which is typically many hours. No hospital bills, though. A previous Liberal government partially implemented universal pharmacare, but it's still only in its first phase and only applies to insulin and a few other things. I don't expect that it will progress past phase 1.

Universal healthcare is popular enough that they can't just abolish it, but right wing provincial governments (healthcare is administered at the provincial level) continually underfund and mismanage it with the hopes of replacing it with a private, for-profit system. The idea is to degrade the system enough to convince the population that fully public healthcare is untenable, and that private options are needed to take some of the load off of the public system. Then, with its replacement in place, the public system can be defunded at an accelerated rate and eventually fully privatized. This demonstrates that social democracy is untenable, and that a dictatorship of the proletariat is needed to protect the gains of the working class.

I'm at the doctor right now here in Australia

Paid nothing. Paid nothing for my tests too

Canadian here I can fall off a ladder break my arm or a leg have a family member drive me to the hospital the doctor will place it cast it send me home and I won't pay a cent. The things you do pay for parking, unnecessary ambulance rides, leg braces, wheelchairs, crutches, unnecessary medication not given to you, prescriptions

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 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

If you come in with blue lights over your head it's great. For non urgent stuff it sucks.

Tried to book an appointment, they did not pick up the phone. Tried calling someone else, they told me to call the place I was registered at (the ones who did not pick up). Cost would have been something like $20 had I bothered to have it looked at. Capped at something like $300 per year.

I have not had to try the urget care (yet) but I know people who have had stroke, cancer, complicated broken bones, who are as good as new and not bankrupt.

You have a problem, say an accident, even one you are yourself to blame.

You or someone else calls an ambulance, you go to the hospital, you get help, then you go home and life continues.

The total absence of problems and even thinking about cost is very much quality of life and means smaller problems get fixed before they get really expensive for you and in effect for society.