Comment by xkbarkar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xkbarkar | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure why you are being downvoted. I live in welfare mecca with the worlds highest tax pressure and heqlthcare is breaking under the load.

Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial procedures can count to decades.

The workforce is aging because young people have stoped reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent foreign non eutopean workforce.

This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not sustainable.

This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably sustain in the long term.

Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current system does not work though.

Everyone suffers like this.

Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics. My private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.

The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.

Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare is??

Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price

> heqlthcare is breaking under the load.

I live in a part of the US with high average incomes and an absolutely excellent hospital system.

And it's breaking, too. If you go to the ER and you're not literally bleeding to death, it will be a 5 or 10 hour wait. I saw someone wait over 3 hours with a visibly and severely dislocated bone.

Non-emergency visits for anything more complicated than "put some ice on it and take some NSAIDs" can easily approach $1,000, and a routine childbirth is up to over $50,000, I think?

Departments are horribly understaffed, the administration pays themselves buckets of money and manages things from 30,000 feet with Excel, and at one point they employed 50 programmers to deal with constantly shifting medical coding rules for dozens of insurance companies.

Insurance for a family often runs $1,000 to $1,500 per month for the employee part, with the employer spending plenty more. And everything about insurance is a corrupt nightmare.

It all barely holds together somehow, at one of the highest costs in the world. And when our local system eventually gets around to it, they provide excellent care—but nothing dramatically better than a private hospital in Paris, and at a much higher price.

Please pick any semi-advanced economy other than USA when talking about healthcare. USA is well known for its corrupt healthcare system. You are picking the worst of the worst as an example.

They're picking the US as an example because the person who started this discussion was saying that the European model is in their view unsustainable. It's possible that that person wants to change Europe into Singapore or something, but given this site, I consider it much more likely that they meant "unsustainable compared to the US".

My experience is that many liberal Americans tend to admire European welfare systems as a counterpoint to the more cut-throat US systems, and really, really don't want to discuss the downsides.

People need to dream, I guess.

The US is a terrible place to live in if you are poor. But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.

> But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.

What's a "typical Hacker News denizen"? Not everyone is driven solely by monetary concerns. I visited the US in autumn, had a good time, but would I live there? No. I think "many services" are actually better in many parts of Europe (such as public transport).

Others may see it differently and that's fine, but please let's not act like the US isn't crumbling under a weight of 100 problems at least just as much as Europe.

A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry. Yeah, there are outliers again, but that is the core demographics here.

The US is pretty big. Personally, I would avoid a lot of places, but, for example, the mix of American and Cuban culture in Florida is really refreshing to me.

Public transport is one of the few things in which the US is definitely behind the times. Not just behind Europe, but behind everyone-but-Africa. For example, the new Chinese-built metro in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is nice, safe and clean. IDK what is wrong with the Americans in this regard...

That said, read the Draghi report. There is absolutely no doubt that Europe needs massive reforms unless it wants to become irrelevant, but there is a lot of doubt if the political will is here.

By far the most important voting bloc are the pensioners, and they don't want any disturbances to the system that served their generation well.

> A typical Hacker News denizen is someone within the US IT industry.

You'd be surprised.

I never said that the EU isn't in need of a reform, just that I wouldn't trade the American problems (opiod crisis, mostly non-walkable cities, gated communities, lack of public transport, lack of architecture older than a couple of hundred years, lack of proximity to other major linguistic centres except Mexico, insane tipping culture, rampant poverty, and let's not talk about the political system, ...) for the ones we have. Others may think differently, that's fine.

…and a major reduction in services.

I live half the year in big cities in the US and half the year in Berlin, capital of the largest economy in the EU.

It’s crazy to me to hear how US people idealize the situation in Europe, or how Europeans talk about the US system. Each has pros and cons but neither can ignore economic reality. Single payer doesn’t mean that money isn’t flowing and negotiations don’t happen. No government can repeal supply and demand without enslaving doctors.

The Slovak government literally wants to try slavery light for doctors.

They passed a bill that makes it a crime for doctors to "avoid work" in some conditions, and these conditions aren't just natural catastrophes etc., but any "emergency due to deficiencies of healthcare" that the government declares at will.

https://minutovezpravy.cz/clanek/slovensko-chce-prinutit-lek...

That made a lot of news. It is every bit as bad as it sounds.

Slovakia under its current government is literally the second-most anti-EU country of the EU (after Hungary - though maybe Austria will soon follow suit), so I'm not sure if that illustrates your point well.

They aren't doing this because they disagree with the EU-wide consensus on general welfare / healthcare policies, though. Fico isn't Javier Milei, he is a pro-Russian populist social democrat, precisely the type of politican that promises unrealistic levels of welfare for a relatively poor state.

As it happens, almost everyone in the EU is trying to support unrealistic levels of welfare relative to their economy, but of course the weaker countries like Slovakia will feel the bite of reality first, while the richest part of the continent can continue kicking the can down the road for a decade or so if they really wish to close their eyes.

Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations. A sick man of Europe all again, and dragging down 10 other economically-intertwined countries with it.

> Though lately, the Germans are starting to have some really somber conversations.

Yeah, and Elon Musk is stoking Alternative für Deutschland. Not sure what's going to come out of it but it doesn't look too good for Germany either.

He is probably getting downvoted by Americans who want to implement the same failing policies in the US.

Or by Europeans that don't care for the 1000th clichéd "EU bad, America good" debate which invariably attracts low-quality comment as is immediately evident.

The comment starts with "let's face it", as if what it was claiming was a self-evident truth. It's not, and writing posts like that isn't really engendering productive debate.

It is hard to deny that the EU has had a long period of stagnation and its economic power relative to other parts of the world has been rapidly shrinking.

It is hard to deny that we have a serious brain drain and a serious investition drain, too. European money regularly looks for investments in the US, to the tune of billions. The other way round? Not so much.

But people really don't want to admit that our welfare/bureaucratic systems can't be sustained with aging populations and stagnant economies.

When you start mentioning aging populations you trip over a fact that is nothing to do with our model. Short of tossing our aging population out onto the street we cannot do much more than increase immigration - something those old people don't like.

So this could be a debate about something completely other than the social model and it's so complicated that it's hard to have any sensible argument about it.

Pay-as-you-go pension system is even worse equipped to deal with the aging situation than others.

The European social democratic model introduced after war relied a lot on having a lot of working age people supporting relatively small cohorts of the elderly. It was a working assumption - before birth control, few could imagine how deeply would fertility collapse.

The German chancellor Adenauer assured the Bundestag that "Leute haben Kinder immer" = people will always have children.

No, not always, no.

A mix of capitalism, socialism and communism is the key, they complement and balance each other

Trying to ostracize one model to favor the other is the recipe for a collapse

Perhaps that's what the USA is, a disposable Empire

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