I guess me living my entire life in a system with universal healthcare, being denied treatments that could have prevented me going deaf and needing a feeding tube is all in my imagination.

The treatments for these werent extreme. It was a fairly simple drug therapy that costs around 5’000 Euro per year and is sold in my country.

It just isn’t on the list of drugs covered by public health insurance. As I’m surviving on 12k per year disability benefits, I could not afford the treatment.

But just because it never impacted you you assume my experience doesn’t exist, because you have the privilege that the system never didn’t work for you, so you assume it works for everyone.

[–] szczuroarturo@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Exatcly they dont know shit. While american healthcare system is clearly fucked there are many problems in european healthcare ( very country dependent tho ) ranging from lack of qualified doctors and long waiting times to very expensive treatments not covered in eu for some reason ( the one ive seen the most being uber expensive often experimental treatment where you usualy have to go to america ).

[–] parrhesia@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 weeks ago

I'm not sure I'm other places but there's a physician shortage in the US, Canada, but there looks to be a shortage in Europe as well..

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9799366/ https://www.euronews.com/health/2024/09/12/doctor-shortages-low-pay-and-overtime-europes-hospitals-are-under-the-weather

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

From what I've seen, treatments not being covered are only the case were those treatments are very expensive and there are other effective treatments (though less effective) which are much cheaper.

There's also often a delay between a new and very expensive experimental treatment coming out and it becoming covered because it won't be covered if it doesn't demonstrate that it's advantages over the other available treatments are sufficient to justify the additional cost.

Mind you, I'm talking about Public Healthcare Systems, not the so-called Mixed Systems that have mandatory Health Insurance (usually highly regulated and with a Public Insurance option for the less well off) - Mixed Systems have some of the same problems as the US System at least in my experience living in countries with one and with the other kind of system.

[–] anarchyrabbit@lemmy.world -1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I have read the UK NHI doesn't work very well exactly for the reasons mentioned above.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The UK NHI doesn't work well because the neoliberal parties in successive governments (both the Tories and New Labour) have been defunding it so that they can - like Thatcher did with the railways - once its quality has fallen due to lack of funds claim that it's bad because of Public management whilst it would be much better if it was Private because the Private Sector is much more competent, and privatise it.

Just like the US has fatcats that are perfectly happy to mass murder people for personal profit, so does the UK (and the British Political System is almost as bad as the American, so it's definitelly sold to the highest bidder) and plenty of those jhave wet dreams of the country having 13% of its GDP flowing through a Private Healthcare sector like the US were they can make billions of pounds doing exactly the same as the fatcats do in US Healthcare.

Source: I lived in Britain for over a decade.

By the way, you "read that the UK NHI doesn't work very well" is exactly because the UK media is overwhelmingly owned by tax avoiding billionaires who are part of the above mentioned fatcats who see themselves as profiting massivelly from Britain having a Healthcare System like the US. It's not by chance that the level of trust of Britons in their Press is one of the lowest in Europe.

The exact same kind of tactics were deployed by Tatcher back when she wanted to privatise the Railways with the result that satisfaction with the Railway system in the UK is now even lower than when there was a public operator even after Thatcher defunded it to claim "Public is Bad, Private is Good" to amass enough public support to privatise it.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com -1 points 2 weeks ago

I'm talking about Universal Health Care systems (for clarity: totally free healthcare for residents in that country), not Public Health Insurance systems.

Europe is unfortunatelly also riddled with the latter system and having lived in countries with one kind and countries with the other, they're quite different and the system with Insurance is invariably worse in terms of denials of coverage as well as cost (also because nowadays they all have laws that force every resident to have health insurance, which as result is more costlier than before those laws - as I saw first hand when I lived in a country with such a system when such a law came into effect), whilst UHC tends to have longer waiting lists (think 1 or 2 years of wait for some cirurgical procedures).

Absolutelly, some of the absurdities of the US system are also present in the so-called "Mixed" Systems (i.e. the ones with healtcare insurance but more regulated and with a public option for some) and if you look at the kinds of governments in those countries for the last 3 decades, you'll notice they've been invariably neoliberal mainstream parties (setting up such systems is part of the broader tendency in Europe to privatise just about everything that has been going on since the 80s and was copied from the US).

IMHO, except for the long waiting times, the problems with Healthcare systems in part of Europe are the result of them having been transformed to become more like the US system in the last 3 decades.