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Comment by emj | Hacker News Reader

This is not Sweden. While a lot of it rings true; like the strange mix of fierce indivudalism and collectivism in Sweden, and how we really did mess upp early elder care. I only have anecdata about elder care; my relative just now died in an one such home from brain damage + malnutrition the amount of care, happines and grit that was done to make her eat was heart warming. The same place hade been hit very hard by Covid, which ment they now had extreme proceedures in place that limited our visiting possibilities, that ment they had zero Covid cases during the peaks in 2021.

I think most of the care homes learnt after the first wave, at least I hope that my experience was representive.

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I would argue that Sweden is not collectivistic at all.

In the golden years of the Folkhem (the people's home) Sweden was collectivistic to a larger extent, but because of the massive increase of living standards, a huge middle class emerged.

Core beliefs of the middle class is typically high individualism and materialism which usually translates to some form of liberalism.

Many, especially on the right, makes the mistake to equate high taxes with collectivism, but that is not necessarily the case, because it depends on how the taxes are collected and what the taxes are used for.

Today the Swedish's left argument for high taxes is to increase individual freedom, not collective freedom. The Swedish's right argument for low taxes is to increase individual freedom, not collective freedom, thus both the left and the right in Sweden is ruled by the same middle class and every big topic in Sweden since the at least 20 years has been of a middle class perspective.

Reducing society to high vs low taxes is one of the most extreme forms of individualism you can have.

While your personal experience is heartwarming, others here point to what I would describe state-approved cruelty of effectively euthanizing elderly who got seriously sick with covid earlier. That's not cool at all and even if now things are different its a right thing to point to these widespread failures that caused a lot of unnecessary death.

Few elderly patients who end up on ventilators for COVID survive, plus the process is very painful and causes permanent damage if you survive. So morphine actually sounds like a pretty good way to go, assuming there's some form of informed consent.

The problem was that there were cases were consent was not given and of healthy 70 year olds having to fight for ventilators at least in the beginning. From what I understood a lot changed when people realized what was happening in June 2020, the paper is pretty vague about this it talks mainly about the first half of 2020.

That is a pretty extreme interpretation of the paper. That view is also not helpfull if you want to talk about the regional problems around Sweden, it has been mentioned in other comments here. The paper is just bringing up a discussion we have had since june 2020 in Sweden, I sure do not think we will not stop discussing it.

> state-approved cruelty of effectively euthanizing elderly

Unless I got the discussion completely backwards, the point here was that these homes are not run by the state. They are either private or by small municipalities, and are not really intended to provide medical care in the same way as hospitals do.

There are probably a lot of details here that's not at all obvious to an outsider of the system, exactly how the care is organized, paid for, and what medical facilities they can access, but I hope that they can learn and improve from this so the next pandemic do not hit the elderly quite this bad.

That some other countries may or may not have been hit worse does not make it any better. This is not a competition.

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