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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

Hold your horses.

Problems of national health systems in other countries are not "globally" visible like insane bills for Americans.

Just go and read up how many British people are nagging about NHS. I expect that there is shitload of corruption in health care in other countries as well but I don't read or speak German or French.

In Poland I heard about case of a doctor that died from overwork, she just collapsed because she was working 3 shifts for a month or something. Don't get me started on emergency crews that are treated like dirt and hired on as B2B contractors.

Well I am not going to get a bill that will ruin me financially but I might end up with no professional health care to help me when I am in trouble because they don't get paid enough and are worked to the ground.

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> Just go and read up how many British people are nagging about NHS.

Us British people are nagging about the NHS because we've had 10+ years of a wannabe-GOP running it into the ground in order to stealth-privatise it and bung billions into theirs and their corrupt chums' pockets.

We love the NHS. We don't love austerity and corruption.

This is a consequence of the NHS existing, though. It's one of the genuinely big downsides to having public healthcare where quality of care will coincide with the controlling government's support and/or aptitude for governing it.

Private healthcare also suffers from poor governance (it's one of the big factors in why the United States' healthcare system is so expensive) but its effects aren't quite as drastic.

The broadest general measures of gdp per capita spent on healthcare as well as life expectancy would indicate that not only does the US pay over double per capita of what every other modern nation pays, it also has 2-5 year lagging life expectancy (not to mention the only modern nation with flat or declining life expectancy).

As an aside, the NHS is indeed flirting with instability right now, but that is due to multiple Tory governments arguably putting policies in place to destabilize and privatize the NHS in the long term. It’s as bizarre as Brexit to me that the British voters are going with it. But there it is.

So private health like in the US that is not tied to any government would fix that? ;)

I don't see that argument as refutation of my argument :)

Because party you don't support is running the system does not mean that when party you support it will get better. I don't believe any party has that much influence over what is happening in health care anyway or is able to fix it.

For France, the root cause for the lack of specialist in some zones is actually not that they aren't paid enough (a generalist, for instance, seem to have it's lower bracket above the median income for a family, and an average that is at 3-5 times it. Sadly, jobs such as nurse have bad pays though...), but more a part of the french medicine school: the "numerus closus". At the end of the first year, students take an exam week, and only the N first students are allowed to pass, with N being a preselected constant for that year. Not everyone is allowed to try again too. This has been criticized for some time and if I remember well was recently removed, but the cynic part of me tell me that they would have no issues crafting an exam specially to have roughly N students pass...

The real blocking point is the internship in the 5th year. There is not enough physician to train our intern at public hospital. So with the end of the numerus closus and some new decision about internship, you can now have 2 interns per surgeons, effectively trading formation quality and old physicians sanity for numbers.

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