I saw your web page, and enjoyed the article on
Please don't quote me by name, but I feel compelled to confide in you a secret about the national health care in much of Europe.
The truth is, in Denmark, Finland, and probably much of the rest of Europe, everyone pays for health care out of pocket at a private doctor's office. I swear I'm not making this up. There is the official national health care system,which people go to if they don't have any sort of urgent need and don't care too much about whom they see, and then there is the private system, whichis unmolested and functions well.
During a vacation in Denmark a few years ago, my wife needed to see a doctor. Our hotel immediately called a private doctor -- they could hardly contain themselves when we asked about the public ones -- and arranged a house call to our hotel room. The doctor showed up, met her for maybe an hour, and charged on the order of $50. We met him again a couple days later for a follow-up visit in his office, seeing only him -- no army of LPNs, nurse practitioners, and medical assistants-- and spent maybe another hour with him, at a cost of around $40. In nearby Finland, the private doctors operate 24/7, at least in Helsinki, and are within pretty much everyone's budget.
The great socialized medicine experiment in Europe is completely different from the single-payer system touted in the US, or the ban on private medicine in Canada. It is, at least in Denmark and Finland, the old US system: some free public clinics, and otherwise an unfettered capitalistic private system. And it seems to function well, except for the free public clinics. The contrast with the United States is not that the system is more socialistic, but that it is less so. They can treat you for something even if they can't decide on what the proper diagnostic code is, and they can tell you how much it will cost to see the doctor before you have actually seen the doctor, without giving you a stack of forms to fill out first. There are no obscure regulatory requirements to make sure that they aren't scamming Medicare.
The next time you hear someone talk about the free health care in Europe, you might suggest a first-hand look. Americans can get to Denmark and Finland fairly cheaply, too, especially if they fly Iceland Air, which incidentally is privately held and relatively unmolested, and one of the few commercially successful airlines, no doubt thanks to the pro-market government that has ruled in Iceland for the past 16 years.
