52 ms·

I'm from Norway. The backside of the medal when it comes to welfare services of that kind is the rather humiliating process you have to go through to actually g

by ThJ 7y ago

I'm from Norway. The backside of the medal when it comes to welfare services of that kind is the rather humiliating process you have to go through to actually get them. I've heard many stories about this. Yes, you'll get help if you do as they say, but it can feel very invasive at times. Some clueless bureaucrat will need to know about your finances and all your medical issues, and if it's not a clear-cut case, these clueless people will need to form opinions about how sick you are and how much help you need, and they'll often be wrong, and you'll have to fight them. It's better than the alternative, of course, but it's not anywhere near being the utopia that U.S. liberals like to describe it as. They're just using us to promote their own agenda. With that said, I do find myself thanking heaven that I was born in this country from time to time.

tehjoker 7y ago
For what it's worth, the ambition on the left over here (in the US) is to eliminate means testing for programs as much as possible. Healthcare problems? Free healthcare for everyone, no forms required. No home? Everyone gets a free / low cost house. We aim to do much more than that (give control of the economy to the people), but a robust welfare state is a good start.
- roenxi 7y ago
  Those are compelling policy handwaves, but they really aren't going to the heart of the issue; which is someone in the broader conversation is basically misrepresenting reality to an astounding degree. The OECD reports that the US already spends more on healthcare per capita than any other nation by a substantial margin [0]. If it were believed that the ambitious left were going to implement free healthcare by bringing actual costs down into line with the rest of the world they could probably muster bipartisan support in a few years. But I bet their plans don't do that - eliminating means testing and more handouts are are just avoiding the real issues. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
  - kazagistar 7y ago
    That's exactly what the left wants, but they are facing bipartisan opposition from both Republicans and the majorty of centrist Democracts, both of whom receive large donations from the massive insurance industry that stands to lose everything.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Giving it to everyone is the cost reduction. Leaving aside the question of old age and focusing on healthcare for people of working age, it is almost always cheaper to intervene earlier, and it helps people get back to work sooner. The case is even stronger in children where healthcare gets to determine if they get to live a decent life or not. Not to mention the benefits of time saved fighting back and forth over bills. A little bit of cost control pushing people onto the cheaper versions of insulin and things like that, in the manner of the UK National Institute for Clinical Excellence would help. This is also what every private insurer does, but people go bananas when contemplating the idea that the government might do it. Oh, and pharma marketing needs reining in. Some of the people who were marketing opiates should be jailed for the damage they've done.
    - vidarh 7y ago
      Medicare has for a long time been banned from negotiating drug prices in most instances, and that is a large part of the problem. They have a limited indirect ability by basically being able to contract with private healthcare plans to provide services, who in turn can negotiate, but it does in no way allow them to leverage their size to the full extent. Compare to e.g. the UK where the NHS does not just negotiate on generics, but also use the considerable value of their contracts for generics or drugs that can easily be substituted to drive down prices on other drugs by bargaining on combined contract values.
- rjf72 7y ago
  Imagine there was a button you could push that would give every single person everything you're mentioning - a free house, free healthcare, and all the things you're not mentioning - free education, free sustenance, free childcare, free longterm paid pa/maternal leave, guaranteed high paying jobs, etc. Who wouldn't push this button? I think every single individual, right/left/libertarian/liberal/conservative or whatever other identity would. The reason people are critical of ideas such as you are mentioning is not because they don't want them, but because they do not think they are economically viable. To get a ballpark for economic factors, let's try to figure out what the total value of absolutely all goods and services transacted, at market value, per year in the US and then divide that by the national population. I think if you asked the average person what they thought this figure would be, most would put it in the hundreds of thousands. Some might even put it in the millions. Fortunately it's really easy to figure out exactly what the answer is. It's precisely what the GDP/capita captures. It's about $62,000. And we're already chopping 27% of that in taxes to fund our current [generally underfunded] programs, so you can drop it down to $45k. That is, as hard as it is to believe, the entire economic product of the country. Our unimaginable achievements - both social and personal can make it hard to realize how little we actually have. So you need to fund all the grand ideas you have in proportion to this keeping in mind that it doesn't mean you have $45k per person to spend. That is the entire economic product of the country. This is why it's much easier to have a grand vision than to actually think about implementing it. Taxing the rich is hardly a solution because it again misses out on just how little we really have. If you go and just take 100% of Bezos' wealth from him, all $150 billion, that works out to about $470 per person - for one year. And he is exponentially richer than most rich. By the time you get to stripping the 20th richest person of all his wealth, you're down to $10s of dollars. Not too long after that, you're down to pennies per person. And that is, again, just money for a single year. These grand ideas need neverending annual funding. --- This is why even in places like Norway, which has extensive national wealth due to a mixture of a small population and large sums of nationalized oil money, it's not just free everything for everybody. Solving all of these issues requires much more than just a desire to solve them. The reason I mention this is because I think this shared desire is something that often gets lost in today's increasingly polarized world. We all want the same things; it's just we disagree on how to get there.
  - 7y ago
- Sharlin 7y ago
  Oh my god, I just read news about some "centrist" Democrats arguing against universal single-payer healthcare on the grounds that some segment of the working population already gets a nice healthcare package as a benefit, and somehow it would be unfair to those people if everyone was eligible to reasonable medical care. I mean, with Democrats like that, why do you even need Republicans?
  - Accipitriform 7y ago
    Right, of course we should want single-payer, just like Canada! Never mind that the average wait time to see a doctor in Canada is almost 20 weeks, and that tens of thousands of Canadians cross the border to the US every year to avoid that wait... There are tradeoffs with everything. Personally I think people should proactively try to live healthier lives - the medical establishment is about making money, not making you healthier. The other major side benefit of that is our society might be able to afford the overall cost of healthcare - it's not looking too good at the moment!
    - Sharlin 7y ago
      Oh puh-lease. Even a trivial googling tells me that Canada has longer waiting times than most other comparable countries with single-payer healthcare. And those waiting times? About half of GP visits are same- or next day appointments, with 20% of Canadians having to wait for a week. As for specialists, the median waiting time is roughly four weeks. [1] So those numbers are definitely not optimal compared to many other countries, but your claim about the average being almost 20 weeks is completely ridiculous. You're entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts. And if your opinions are based on your own facts, don't expect to be taken seriously in any reasonably educated company. Now, according to [2], the US fares well on two metrics: waiting time to see a specialist and waiting time to elective surgeries. Unsurprisingly, both of these are conditional on already having gotten a referral and/or having decided to book the appointment or operation. That is, most of the time, if you have decided you can afford it! Indeed, cost barriers were by far the highest in the US, as measured by the fraction of people who skipped treatment or medication due to cost. [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3251833/canada-has-some-of-the-longest-wait-times-to-see-doctors-specialists-report/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3251833/canada-has-some-of-the-lo... [2] https://www.cihi.ca/sites/default/files/document/text-alternative-version-2016-cmwf-en-web.pdf https://www.cihi.ca/sites/default/files/document/text-altern...
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > For what it's worth, the ambition on the left over here (in the US) is to eliminate means testing for programs as much as possible. No, it's not. There's a subset of the left that has that ambition, but there's a subset of the left that subscribes very hard to the idea that doing so is improperly aiding the wealthy (even though “eliminate means testing” mostly means “consolidate means testing into the tax system rather than duplicating the income verification function redundantly across various programs plus the tax system”.) Now, it's true that the thought leadership on the left is mostly in the former group, and the public figures talking up the latter position are mostly center-right neoliberals. But they are using the specific rhetoric they are using because it appeals to a wide swathe of the rank-and-file left and allows them to seem progressive when what they are actually doing is defending the ability of the rich to preserve advantages that exist for them in the status quo system while blocking progress to universal access. (And that's true whether it's healthcare or college funding or whatever else.)
hestipod 7y ago
I will take what you described over the US situation any day, and don't hear any liberals I know describing it as perfect or a utopia...people in the best quality of life nations on Earth still complain about things of course, but don't really understand being without that net...it's not perfection, just much better than here, and keeping people from losing everything due to medical debt etc, and giving them help to rebuild when a catastrophe hits. If the agenda is to get those things then push away I say. Personally I will either be back abroad if I can succeed somehow, or dead if I cannot, by the time real change could even begin happen in the USA. It's many years away for even the first real steps to be enacted, and many decades at a minimum before it could even begin to approach parity with your region...if it happens at all and isn't sunk by more of the same old. But I wish it for the masses here.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
This is why I support a universal basic income without means testing i.e. universal.
- mgoetzke 7y ago
  Me too, though in the case of big medical issues etc there will still be a requirement to somehow get more than that. Same with unemployment benefits etc. E.g a 1000 $ per person is not good enough should you find yourself unemployed suddenly. Some insurance (private or gov or both) will remain.
  - SubiculumCode 7y ago
    I believe helath care is an issue, like housing, that needs especial attention from additional local,state, and federal policies
raverbashing 7y ago
"Backside" All of this sounds like just regular checks to prevent abuse of the system "Humiliating"? Maybe, but that's their job. No I don't think it could be much different. Of course it's not an utopia, but I've heard much worse from countries much less well off than the US. I don't think any country does that much better than Norway tbh
- maehwasu 7y ago
  Agree—it’s perfectly reasonable for them to do this, and likely the only way the system could function at good cost and without abuse. However, the problem in an American context is that people would likely see this as invasive. They’d demand the free treatment without the privacy invasions needed to make it work. To be clear, I think the tradeoff is absolutely worth it, but America’s track record in making reasonable tradeoffs is awful.
  - pvaldes 7y ago
    > the problem in an American context is that people would likely see this as invasive Stop miseducating them. People has been educated to accept their TV spying and registering their home conversations all day as the new normal, but 'this' is too invasive?.
    - maehwasu 7y ago
      shrug People freak out about national id numbers, even though SSNs are already that. I don’t know why Americans react worse to certain things, but they clearly do, even in the face of lots of education.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    This used to be a problem in Norway too. People going without services they were entitled to because it was seen as humiliating to ask was a real thing. The only way of getting rid of that is to actually offer the services and point out that it is a choice: You don't have to go through it, but then you don't get the money. I generally think that a lot of the more invasive checks are not justified, but if the price to pay to get agreement for more expansive welfare services is an invasive means testing process, then it's certainly better than not having the services.
jacobush 7y ago
I’m from Sweden, same system. I’d MUCH rather have this than the alternative.
- maxheadroom 7y ago
  På riktigt! :)
lm28469 7y ago
I feel like it's partly made to avoid people abusing the system. In France for example a lot of people go to the doctor for the most ridiculous things because 1: it's free (at least at the individual level) and 2: it's an easy way to get a sick leave (sick leaves have been exploding in the last few years). Same with emergency rooms, people don't know what an emergency is, they just use them as walk in clinic. Every time someone goes to the doc for a small headache or a common cold, just for the doc to tell them "well, just wait it'll go away, here have some aspirin", it cost something like $30-100 to the whole system.
- mantale 7y ago
  Doctor visit are never free in France you always pay 1€ which is deducted from future reimbursements. Also you still have to pay 70% of the 25€ unless you have additional private insurance.
- bdukic 7y ago
  >it's free (at least at the individual level) Is it though? As far as I remember, to visit a doctor you had to pay €25 out of your pocket at the moment of the visit, 70% of which would be refunded by your health insurance at a later point (under the state system, and potentially more if you're paying for the additional private insurance or "mutuelle".
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Faark 7y ago
    Cannot comment on France, but [0] is a german wikipedia article about a counterpart we had in germany. From 2004 til 2012, you had to pay 10€ to the first doctor you visited in a quarter. Not a great system and we thankfully got rid of it again. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxisgebühr https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxisgebühr (in german)
disordinary 7y ago
Here in New Zealand you don't get asked any questions about finances or being able to afford it but if it's elective and not urgent you'll be prioritised behind those who need the healthcare urgently. No bureaucrats involved (unless it's very specialised care like experimental medication or the need to send someone overseas) just the doctors and specialists. Public healthcare isn't the same in every country.
- philliphaydon 7y ago
  If it’s elective it’s not covered at all in NZ. Was my understanding. If it’s not urgent you’re on a waiting list unless you have private insurance. I haven’t lived in NZ for like 12 years so I could be wrong.
  - disordinary 7y ago
    You can definitely have elective surgery through the public health system but there's a set number done per year whereas all other treatment are done as soon as possible.
    - philliphaydon 7y ago
      Interesting. Learn something new every day. My dad’s cancer treatment last year was completely covered. Even the hospital lodge my parents stayed at for a few weeks while he was in hospital was covered. I’m Glad that NZ isn’t a completely socialist country and just has socialist ideals.
      - disordinary 7y ago
        It's always going to be a balance. Capitalism drives innovation and investment but making money at the expense of everything else isn't good for individuals or the environment. Socialism might be better for the environment or individuals in theory but it's not good for investment or innovation. Like with most things in life being a purist is damaging, you need to be pragmatic and let capitalism do what it's good at and temper it with socialism when it's counterproductive.

by ThJ 7y ago

tehjoker 7y ago

For what it's worth, the ambition on the left over here (in the US) is to eliminate means testing for programs as much as possible. Healthcare problems? Free healthcare for everyone, no forms required. No home? Everyone gets a free / low cost house. We aim to do much more than that (give control of the economy to the people), but a robust welfare state is a good start.

roenxi 7y ago
Those are compelling policy handwaves, but they really aren't going to the heart of the issue; which is someone in the broader conversation is basically misrepresenting reality to an astounding degree. The OECD reports that the US already spends more on healthcare per capita than any other nation by a substantial margin [0]. If it were believed that the ambitious left were going to implement free healthcare by bringing actual costs down into line with the rest of the world they could probably muster bipartisan support in a few years. But I bet their plans don't do that - eliminating means testing and more handouts are are just avoiding the real issues. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
- kazagistar 7y ago
  That's exactly what the left wants, but they are facing bipartisan opposition from both Republicans and the majorty of centrist Democracts, both of whom receive large donations from the massive insurance industry that stands to lose everything.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Giving it to everyone is the cost reduction. Leaving aside the question of old age and focusing on healthcare for people of working age, it is almost always cheaper to intervene earlier, and it helps people get back to work sooner. The case is even stronger in children where healthcare gets to determine if they get to live a decent life or not. Not to mention the benefits of time saved fighting back and forth over bills. A little bit of cost control pushing people onto the cheaper versions of insulin and things like that, in the manner of the UK National Institute for Clinical Excellence would help. This is also what every private insurer does, but people go bananas when contemplating the idea that the government might do it. Oh, and pharma marketing needs reining in. Some of the people who were marketing opiates should be jailed for the damage they've done.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    Medicare has for a long time been banned from negotiating drug prices in most instances, and that is a large part of the problem. They have a limited indirect ability by basically being able to contract with private healthcare plans to provide services, who in turn can negotiate, but it does in no way allow them to leverage their size to the full extent. Compare to e.g. the UK where the NHS does not just negotiate on generics, but also use the considerable value of their contracts for generics or drugs that can easily be substituted to drive down prices on other drugs by bargaining on combined contract values.
rjf72 7y ago
Imagine there was a button you could push that would give every single person everything you're mentioning - a free house, free healthcare, and all the things you're not mentioning - free education, free sustenance, free childcare, free longterm paid pa/maternal leave, guaranteed high paying jobs, etc. Who wouldn't push this button? I think every single individual, right/left/libertarian/liberal/conservative or whatever other identity would. The reason people are critical of ideas such as you are mentioning is not because they don't want them, but because they do not think they are economically viable. To get a ballpark for economic factors, let's try to figure out what the total value of absolutely all goods and services transacted, at market value, per year in the US and then divide that by the national population. I think if you asked the average person what they thought this figure would be, most would put it in the hundreds of thousands. Some might even put it in the millions. Fortunately it's really easy to figure out exactly what the answer is. It's precisely what the GDP/capita captures. It's about $62,000. And we're already chopping 27% of that in taxes to fund our current [generally underfunded] programs, so you can drop it down to $45k. That is, as hard as it is to believe, the entire economic product of the country. Our unimaginable achievements - both social and personal can make it hard to realize how little we actually have. So you need to fund all the grand ideas you have in proportion to this keeping in mind that it doesn't mean you have $45k per person to spend. That is the entire economic product of the country. This is why it's much easier to have a grand vision than to actually think about implementing it. Taxing the rich is hardly a solution because it again misses out on just how little we really have. If you go and just take 100% of Bezos' wealth from him, all $150 billion, that works out to about $470 per person - for one year. And he is exponentially richer than most rich. By the time you get to stripping the 20th richest person of all his wealth, you're down to $10s of dollars. Not too long after that, you're down to pennies per person. And that is, again, just money for a single year. These grand ideas need neverending annual funding. --- This is why even in places like Norway, which has extensive national wealth due to a mixture of a small population and large sums of nationalized oil money, it's not just free everything for everybody. Solving all of these issues requires much more than just a desire to solve them. The reason I mention this is because I think this shared desire is something that often gets lost in today's increasingly polarized world. We all want the same things; it's just we disagree on how to get there.
- 7y ago
Sharlin 7y ago
Oh my god, I just read news about some "centrist" Democrats arguing against universal single-payer healthcare on the grounds that some segment of the working population already gets a nice healthcare package as a benefit, and somehow it would be unfair to those people if everyone was eligible to reasonable medical care. I mean, with Democrats like that, why do you even need Republicans?
- Accipitriform 7y ago
  Right, of course we should want single-payer, just like Canada! Never mind that the average wait time to see a doctor in Canada is almost 20 weeks, and that tens of thousands of Canadians cross the border to the US every year to avoid that wait... There are tradeoffs with everything. Personally I think people should proactively try to live healthier lives - the medical establishment is about making money, not making you healthier. The other major side benefit of that is our society might be able to afford the overall cost of healthcare - it's not looking too good at the moment!
  - Sharlin 7y ago
    Oh puh-lease. Even a trivial googling tells me that Canada has longer waiting times than most other comparable countries with single-payer healthcare. And those waiting times? About half of GP visits are same- or next day appointments, with 20% of Canadians having to wait for a week. As for specialists, the median waiting time is roughly four weeks. [1] So those numbers are definitely not optimal compared to many other countries, but your claim about the average being almost 20 weeks is completely ridiculous. You're entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts. And if your opinions are based on your own facts, don't expect to be taken seriously in any reasonably educated company. Now, according to [2], the US fares well on two metrics: waiting time to see a specialist and waiting time to elective surgeries. Unsurprisingly, both of these are conditional on already having gotten a referral and/or having decided to book the appointment or operation. That is, most of the time, if you have decided you can afford it! Indeed, cost barriers were by far the highest in the US, as measured by the fraction of people who skipped treatment or medication due to cost. [1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3251833/canada-has-some-of-the-longest-wait-times-to-see-doctors-specialists-report/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3251833/canada-has-some-of-the-lo... [2] https://www.cihi.ca/sites/default/files/document/text-alternative-version-2016-cmwf-en-web.pdf https://www.cihi.ca/sites/default/files/document/text-altern...
dragonwriter 7y ago
> For what it's worth, the ambition on the left over here (in the US) is to eliminate means testing for programs as much as possible. No, it's not. There's a subset of the left that has that ambition, but there's a subset of the left that subscribes very hard to the idea that doing so is improperly aiding the wealthy (even though “eliminate means testing” mostly means “consolidate means testing into the tax system rather than duplicating the income verification function redundantly across various programs plus the tax system”.) Now, it's true that the thought leadership on the left is mostly in the former group, and the public figures talking up the latter position are mostly center-right neoliberals. But they are using the specific rhetoric they are using because it appeals to a wide swathe of the rank-and-file left and allows them to seem progressive when what they are actually doing is defending the ability of the rich to preserve advantages that exist for them in the status quo system while blocking progress to universal access. (And that's true whether it's healthcare or college funding or whatever else.)

hestipod 7y ago

I will take what you described over the US situation any day, and don't hear any liberals I know describing it as perfect or a utopia...people in the best quality of life nations on Earth still complain about things of course, but don't really understand being without that net...it's not perfection, just much better than here, and keeping people from losing everything due to medical debt etc, and giving them help to rebuild when a catastrophe hits. If the agenda is to get those things then push away I say. Personally I will either be back abroad if I can succeed somehow, or dead if I cannot, by the time real change could even begin happen in the USA. It's many years away for even the first real steps to be enacted, and many decades at a minimum before it could even begin to approach parity with your region...if it happens at all and isn't sunk by more of the same old. But I wish it for the masses here.

SubiculumCode 7y ago

This is why I support a universal basic income without means testing i.e. universal.

mgoetzke 7y ago
Me too, though in the case of big medical issues etc there will still be a requirement to somehow get more than that. Same with unemployment benefits etc. E.g a 1000 $ per person is not good enough should you find yourself unemployed suddenly. Some insurance (private or gov or both) will remain.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  I believe helath care is an issue, like housing, that needs especial attention from additional local,state, and federal policies

raverbashing 7y ago

"Backside" All of this sounds like just regular checks to prevent abuse of the system "Humiliating"? Maybe, but that's their job. No I don't think it could be much different. Of course it's not an utopia, but I've heard much worse from countries much less well off than the US. I don't think any country does that much better than Norway tbh

maehwasu 7y ago
Agree—it’s perfectly reasonable for them to do this, and likely the only way the system could function at good cost and without abuse. However, the problem in an American context is that people would likely see this as invasive. They’d demand the free treatment without the privacy invasions needed to make it work. To be clear, I think the tradeoff is absolutely worth it, but America’s track record in making reasonable tradeoffs is awful.
- pvaldes 7y ago
  > the problem in an American context is that people would likely see this as invasive Stop miseducating them. People has been educated to accept their TV spying and registering their home conversations all day as the new normal, but 'this' is too invasive?.
  - maehwasu 7y ago
    shrug People freak out about national id numbers, even though SSNs are already that. I don’t know why Americans react worse to certain things, but they clearly do, even in the face of lots of education.
- vidarh 7y ago
  This used to be a problem in Norway too. People going without services they were entitled to because it was seen as humiliating to ask was a real thing. The only way of getting rid of that is to actually offer the services and point out that it is a choice: You don't have to go through it, but then you don't get the money. I generally think that a lot of the more invasive checks are not justified, but if the price to pay to get agreement for more expansive welfare services is an invasive means testing process, then it's certainly better than not having the services.

jacobush 7y ago

I’m from Sweden, same system. I’d MUCH rather have this than the alternative.

maxheadroom 7y ago
På riktigt! :)

lm28469 7y ago

I feel like it's partly made to avoid people abusing the system. In France for example a lot of people go to the doctor for the most ridiculous things because 1: it's free (at least at the individual level) and 2: it's an easy way to get a sick leave (sick leaves have been exploding in the last few years). Same with emergency rooms, people don't know what an emergency is, they just use them as walk in clinic. Every time someone goes to the doc for a small headache or a common cold, just for the doc to tell them "well, just wait it'll go away, here have some aspirin", it cost something like $30-100 to the whole system.

mantale 7y ago
Doctor visit are never free in France you always pay 1€ which is deducted from future reimbursements. Also you still have to pay 70% of the 25€ unless you have additional private insurance.
bdukic 7y ago
>it's free (at least at the individual level) Is it though? As far as I remember, to visit a doctor you had to pay €25 out of your pocket at the moment of the visit, 70% of which would be refunded by your health insurance at a later point (under the state system, and potentially more if you're paying for the additional private insurance or "mutuelle".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Faark 7y ago
  Cannot comment on France, but [0] is a german wikipedia article about a counterpart we had in germany. From 2004 til 2012, you had to pay 10€ to the first doctor you visited in a quarter. Not a great system and we thankfully got rid of it again. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxisgebühr https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxisgebühr (in german)

disordinary 7y ago

Here in New Zealand you don't get asked any questions about finances or being able to afford it but if it's elective and not urgent you'll be prioritised behind those who need the healthcare urgently. No bureaucrats involved (unless it's very specialised care like experimental medication or the need to send someone overseas) just the doctors and specialists. Public healthcare isn't the same in every country.

philliphaydon 7y ago
If it’s elective it’s not covered at all in NZ. Was my understanding. If it’s not urgent you’re on a waiting list unless you have private insurance. I haven’t lived in NZ for like 12 years so I could be wrong.
- disordinary 7y ago
  You can definitely have elective surgery through the public health system but there's a set number done per year whereas all other treatment are done as soon as possible.
  - philliphaydon 7y ago
    Interesting. Learn something new every day. My dad’s cancer treatment last year was completely covered. Even the hospital lodge my parents stayed at for a few weeks while he was in hospital was covered. I’m Glad that NZ isn’t a completely socialist country and just has socialist ideals.
    - disordinary 7y ago
      It's always going to be a balance. Capitalism drives innovation and investment but making money at the expense of everything else isn't good for individuals or the environment. Socialism might be better for the environment or individuals in theory but it's not good for investment or innovation. Like with most things in life being a purist is damaging, you need to be pragmatic and let capitalism do what it's good at and temper it with socialism when it's counterproductive.