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Comment by emptysongglass | Hacker News Reader

As a fellow Dane, you must also know how close our public healthcare is to crumbling, how long wait times are for care, our record highest cancer rate in the world of any nation, and a policy of treating only acute conditions (no cancer screenings deemed "unnecessary" etc.)

I have been misdiagnosed a number of times and was finally treated in the US for a major condition the doctors missed here in Denmark.

We get a number of privileges for our very high tax: childcare is cheap, education is free, and births cost us virtually nothing but let's not try and overstate the value of our system to theirs. Ours too is broken, it's just a matter of degrees and where.

Our middle-class, in return, gets taxed to high heaven while our income disparity between rich and poor continues to widen.

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I know someone in the US who is currently being treated for cancer. His chemo drugs have been hit by shortages and he has to beg his insurance company to approve of a different chemo drug for this life saving treatment.

While all systems have their issues, it cannot be undersold how absolutely captive American health is to the profit motive of private companies. If it does not leave room for profit in the US, we are told to die.

This is a good point but you really need to have a comparison when you say your healthcare is crumbling. Are you talking about specialized care?

I think healthcare in the US is beyond messed up. In my area which is a large city in the North East US it is very difficult to be able to get into ER because rooms are filled with people who are trying to get non-urgent care. These people have no money, no insurance and their only way to get care is to go to ER. System is rotten to the core.

I also did not get your last paragraph are you talking about the US or Denmark? I would be shocked to hear income inequality problem is worse in Denmark.

I'm talking about general and specialist care in the public system. Our private system is pretty good but you either need to pay insurance for it or, if the public wait-list extends beyond 6 months for surgical treatment, our public healthcare will pay for you to be referred to a private hospital.

The less said about our mental healthcare the better.

> I also did not get your last paragraph are you talking about the US or Denmark? I would be shocked to hear income inequality problem is worse in Denmark.

I was shocked too when I first heard it but live here long enough and it's very obvious. Income inequality has increased over the last thirty years with a Gini coefficient of 30 [1] in 2022.

[1] https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/arbejde-og-indkomst/in...

While it’s a crude metric, the US is 42 on that scale (usually rendered as 0.42), so significantly worse.

That's what we get for letting Lars Løkke destroy our health system for over two decades. Remember that the US way was the explicit goal of Fogh's government. Venstre is sister parties with the Democrates after all. Our issues are just underscoring the dangers of privatization, new public management, and liberalism.

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