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Comment by throwaways885 | Hacker News Reader

> And once you're paying taxes, there's no point to buy health insurance separately, as you will automatically qualify for "free" healthcare.

The downside of socialised health care is the extensive waiting lists for everything.

I live under the NHS, and while it's a brilliant system, I do understand those with the means wanting to avoid it.

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I haven't really experienced that here in Belgium tho I have heard of some long waiting now for certain specialists like orthodontists, gastroenterologist or others that were forced to partially drop work during the peaks of the pandemic.

Indeed, but that's only really because we've underfunded it. It wasn't so long ago (last labour government) that waiting times were reasonable, and it wouldn't take all that much money to fix.

Funding for the NHS has massively increased YoY. Ageing population is the issue and it's not as easily solved with money as you might suspect.

It still has one of the lowest per-capita budgets of healthcare systems in developed nations. If one wants to explain why wait times are high compared to other healthcare systems, that would seem a more obvious explanation than the single-payer funding model. I would agree that an ageing population is also a factor.

True. You can skip the line here actually by paying for your doctor visit, but that also means you have to pay out of pocket for any further actions based on your diagnosis.

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