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Comment by halsom | Hacker News Reader

Doctors still do house calls, but if you’re poor then you’re lucky to be seeing a doctor at all. Neither of these things have changed.

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Unless you live in a country with universal healthcare.

There is no relation between universal healthcare and house visits. I live in a country with universal healthcare where house calls don't exist.

I believe the parent commenter was noting that with universal healthcare the relation to poverty and not being to see the doctor was not longer a problem.

That is not completely true either, most countries have a form of free basic care: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...

Here in the UK I didn’t think house calls exist, but then my wife got a severe chest infection while she was pregnant on a weekend. I called the NHS help line, and there was a doctor with us in 4 hours.

There’s always a price.

My Dad was a doctor, so technically we got a house call everyday. But the reality was that we never saw a doctor at all. If we needed a physical for school sports my dad would just look at us and say "Eh, you look healthy" and sign it. I was in my early 30s before I got a real checkup from a doctor for the first time since I was born.

Did your dad also administer immunizations himself?

Actually, yes. Also, whenever one of us needed a medication he would just write the prescription for what we needed. The only exceptions were if one of us broke a limb. Then he'd take us to a friend doctor who specialized in that sort of thing to fix us up.

When I was kid in Germany the doctor would do housecalls when I had fever. These days I can imagine this done only for very old people, either in Germany or the US.

They did in Sweden as wheel until the early 90s

* as well

Never going to get used to double checking what I type on the phone =(

In Denmark they did a housecall for my daughter when she was about 1 year old and it was possible she had pneumonia and it was a weekend.

on edit: I remember when I was living in Germany about the age of 7 I had a fever of 40 and the doctor did a housecall.

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