Yup, good reminder that we're here in the US being like "We should be able to tell what absurd price we are going to be charged before we get the procedure so we can decide if we want to shop around and we can't even do that!", and still on "if only we could do that, it would be a victory!". Geesh, we're screwed.
These stories are amazing to read as a Canadian. I recently went to my doctor for chronic foot pain and I was into the MRI within a week (albeit at 3AM) and didn't pay a cent.
I have received multiple offers to work in the US as a dev but the quality of life and safety nets here in Canada are more important to me than a higher salary.
And if you do insist on going private for a kidney MRI, a quick google shows prices are in the 200-400 pound range ($280-$560, roughly) for MRI of the abdomen.
It wasn’t a medical emergency. He visited his Primary Care physician, who recommended an MRI, which was performed at a hospital.
In the U.S. it’s possible (but not widely known) that you can shop around for medical imaging like MRIs. (My wife has saved thousands of dollars doing this.) Hospitals often run these as profit centers so the markup is quite steep.
I think this is part of why the system is so hard to change. Because of these informal workarounds, most well-educated, reasonably-savvy people can navigate it and get to an acceptable outcome. But people with less familiarity/sophistication/resources get screwed badly. So the system only fails the people who have no power to change it.
Someone is ought to bring Europe up. Yeah, you’d get it for free in Belgium or Germany. The wait times though… could anything from couple weeks to half a year.
you may struggle/it may take long to find certain things to get a diagnosis, but once you do, it's a ball that gets rolling insanely fast.
2 anecdotal examples:
colleague's young child was fainting, took them quite a while to get through the right set of doctors/specialists to find out it was a brain tumor - after that was found though, they were scheduled for surgery the next morning. Operation successful, child okay.
I had an appendectomy in the middle of covid: went to the ER unannounced at 7 p.m. - was on the table at 1 a.m. - i paid 50 euros (10 for each day i spent there (they kept me for 3-4 days "just in case")). This was quoted to me up front (the rate, but not the number of days) and i signed a document stating i understood that charge before i was in surgery.
That’s all correct. The point is it’s incredibly hard to get to the specialist at times. I was trying to get an appointment in Belgium, they could only offer April 2022.
In Germany, in the vast majority of cases, you can simply go to any doctor's practice (including specialists, no referral required) during office hours and see the doctor the same day, if it's urgent. They'll squeeze you in.
For non-urgent appointments, yes, the wait time for specialists can sometimes be months.
There is one major healthcare provider in my region. When I arrived here, the wait time for a physical was more than two months. The shitty US system is not giving me at-will service.
Similar price in London. One provider I checked indicated $560 for their "platinum service" which included lots of mostly pointless extras, but $280 for the basic service.
Private hospitals in London largely live off a split of offering cheap convenience or extracting money from foreign patients, but there are so many of them fighting for a small pool of patients given most people just go to the NHS that they have to compete hard.
For reference, i got an MRI in two days for knee pain after i fell with a bike and the pain didn't go away after a few weeks ( so obviously nothing urgent).
And FYI, i paid for it, iirc 60-100 euros, repaid in full by my medical insurance.
So, yeah, there is a point on who considers what an emergency.
They were saying they had pain and nausea, the doctor suspected a kidney stone. Is this an "emergency"? I have had a kidney stone, it is intense pain. My mother had one, said it reminded her of childbirth.
But it won't kill you, probably. You could just be in intense pain for weeks or longer waiting to pass it.
Is that an emergency? I think in probably any sane medical system it is. In the USA? No idea.
I live in Canada, and I've seen people put on 6+ month waitlists for (a) MRI after a concussion to make sure there's no internal bleeding (which can kill in a single day), (b) MRI after a stroke to diagnose the root cause, (c) ACL replacement surgery.
Universal healthcare is great, but when you're in a 2-party system and one party undermines it whenever they're in power, the result is terrible.
I'm sorry to hear that, but it's not quite relevant to the point that the parent was making about Europe.
For what it's worth, I live in the UK which has similar woes to how you describe Canada's two-party system. However we do normally get seen quickly for things which are a threat to life---but elective operations can take much longer. Mental health issues are also dealt with sluggishly at best.
Describe emergency. Sure, you’ll get an MRI after a car crash. But you could be in this state where you’re not dying, but still very uncomfortable. The wait list is pretty long then.
Do you have studies on waiting times that you can cite here? Genuinely asking because I know they certainly exist for Canada[1] with breakdowns down to the Province [2] so I'm just assuming you have some proof that can be used to bolster your claim.
In most of Europe you still have the option of going private if you want that, either with private insurance on a "top up" basis, or paying per appointment.
I don't know what the prices are in Germany, but in London an abdominal MRI is in the $280-$600 range. (EDIT: And you can usually get a same or next day appointment)
Prices in Germany are set by the government. If you check the Gebührenordnung für Ärzte you'll see that in private practice an abdominal MRI is EUR 256.46.
That it is worth it that people go bankrupt due to medical issues because it means that certain professions can earn 6 figures?
I’m really curious. What do you think you are saying? How do you think those two statements correspond? Do you genuinely believe that if the majority of Europe were to ditch its public health services that salaries would go up and that that would be a good thing?
My point is that even if you have to pay market rates for private healthcare insurance in the US (which are crazy high), the overall system in the US works better for many HN-types because while your expenses may be much higher, your income is disproportionately higher (as in 2-5x higher).
So you are saying that HN-types got theirs (the huge salary), so they should not care about others? Or are you causing them of a "I got mine, fuck you" attitude? I am still not sure what you are trying to say. But the fact that you LEFT the US that has that kind of dynamic for Germany, where income inequality is smaller and many things -- including medicine -- are more widely accessible makes me scratch my head.
> So you are saying that HN-types got theirs (the huge salary), so they should not care about others? Or are you causing them of a "I got mine, fuck you" attitude?
Neither of those things, no. (Also, if you think of €100k as "a huge salary", you should recalibrate; in the industrialized world it is not.)
> I am still not sure what you are trying to say. But the fact that you LEFT the US that has that kind of dynamic for Germany, where income inequality is smaller and many things -- including medicine -- are more widely accessible makes me scratch my head.
The healthcare in Germany appears to be somewhat crap compared to the highest level of care available in the US. It's an order of magnitude cheaper, though.
I left the US because the US is a police state, not because best-in-the-world healthcare has highest-in-the-world prices.
My comment could best be summarized as "health care costs should not be a major concern in your life as a SWE because they will be cheap (to you) everywhere, so make your SWE life choices based on other things". You can inaccurately paraphrase this as a rejection of concern for social justice, income inequality, or a generalized "fuck you, got mine" at your own peril.
(FWIW, I think national boundaries are mostly irrelevant and unimportant, and drawing the boundary of your official-concern-for-the-wellbeing-of-others at an invisible line checkpoint to be somewhat closeminded. There are billions without meaningful modern healthcare access at all (or even clean water) so the selfrighteous indignation bit about the relative quality and expense of healthcare in two major industrialized western nations is sort of a silly nit to pick.)
I got an MRI in France a few years back, not an emergency. Booked an appointment for the next day. To be fair, 30 years ago when MRIs were kinda new and machines were extremely expensive, I remember there was not enough of them and patients and doctors complained of long wait times. That's not been an issue in a while.
That's what normalization of deviance looks like.