A side note

[blamebrampton]

Dear Americans,
Outside of your strange, strange country, most of the developed world has this marvellous thing which we like to call health care for all. I'm reading an interesting mpreg (that will teach me not to read the warnings!*) story from hd_hols and the poverty-stricken pregnant one is in despair as his health insurance will not cover it. On the off-chance it was written by someone on my flist, the good for society news is that in the UK, this is not the problem you might think it is! And I have my fingers crossed that in the US, it won't be for much longer, either.

(And if anyone is planning to respond telling me that socialised healthcare is evil, I will LAUGH AT YOU, and then I will QUOTE REAMS OF STATISTICS until you FLEE.)

XXX
BB

* And yes, my dislike of mpreg is not supported by the excellent writing that occurs within that genre and the imaginative plots that many superior writers bring to bear on the concept. But I still don't like it!

Comments

[old-enough.livejournal.com]

I was born in the US, but haven't lived there for a long time--Denmark is home. I still don't understand the US's horror of national healthcare or anything else remotely socialized, or that they can claim that it doesn't work.

I've been seriously ill here and there--no significant difference in the quality of the care, although here I have to push a bit more and there I have to resist a bit the things I felt were unnecessary. The difference was that there I was faced with mountains of paper and invoices (fortunately paid mostly by insurance) that had truly amazing figures that were followed by stunning numbers of zeros. I have never seen an invoice or any paper other than explanations of what was wrong and how they treated it. Oh, except for I did have to pay a small amount for a private phone in my hospital room here, but that was a cash transaction carried out by my husband at the phone company kiosk down in the hospital lobby.

Incidentally, I was in the UK last summer when I had a bad accident right at the beginning of a month long holiday. The NHS did not live up to its reputation at all. The care I received from the moment I staggered through the Accident and Casualty room's door was all I could ask for. Yes Danish hospitals are more modern and more "electronic" but I hardly felt like the treatment was sub-standard and when I did eventually make it home, the doctors here were seriously impressed with the work that had been done. And again, not a single invoice and not even a question of whether I had insurance.

The Scandinavian economies (outside of Iceland which has pretty much gone its own way since the second world war) are relatively healthy even in these dark financial days, the welfare state isn't under serious threat and still the US insists that nothing socialized can ever even begin to possibly work. Denmark has no national debt (and yes we have troops fighting in the middle east too). As I said before, I just can't begin to understand the mindset that insists that what we do can't possibly work.

Now, if we could just do something about what I see as the institutionalized racism/ethnicism of the the national government here AND if we could get over our national schizophrenia about the EU (come on guys, we are either in or we are out! It really doesn't work when we try to swim both ways at the same time), I might actually think that we were doing a pretty good job of governing ourselves.