[mahd43]

"Free" childcare, tuition etc in Europe is a myth. There's no such thing as free.

on a salary of $150,000 you pay more than $75,000 in income tax in many EU countries, then add to that various other taxes like real estate tax etc.

For that you get poor public schools, poor healthcare etc.

Last time I scheduled an appointment at the FREE doctor I had to wait 4 weeks for him to see me.

So I had to go to a private one and pay cash, after already paying huge sums of money for this supposedly cheap and awesome european healthcare.

[analyzethis]

Counter example from Denmark, a European country: two weeks ago my son had a rash (no other symptoms), preventing me from dropping him off at daycare. I called the doctor at 8.30 a.m., had an appointment at the FREE doctor at 11. Problem solved in less than three hours.

[mahd43]

Yeah, sure, there's going to be positive counterexamples.

Waiting times (specially for say for some types of surgery are an issue in Denmark also).

Look, I have extensive experience from inside the the system, maybe I can write a more detailed post about how this works and some reasons why US healthcare can be so expensive, if anyone is interested in that.

But just a quick example, health care costs on national levels fluctuate through the years, and so do collected taxes and hence how much of that pile is allocated to healthcare.

This can result in a doctor treating your son differently in 2016 than in 2017, an neither the doctor or the hospital will tell you this.

For example he might need a surgery, which will be done with an invasive surgical procedure (opening up a person with a scalpel), even though a non-invasive laser procedure is available and the hospital has all the necessary equipment & and the doctors trained.

-- In short, examples of generally best health care systems in Europe are Switzerland, Netherlands, and NOT England (NHS) or France.

[socialist_coder]

> on a salary of $150,000

Europe is about bringing everyone to the average. It is not a land of extremes like the US. Your $150k example salary is super super high for Europe so it's going to get pushed way down to be closer to the average.

If you take your example but change the salary to any number in the lower / middle class range, you are going to be far better off.

That is just the nature of the EU vs the US. If you're rich, the US is great. If you're not rich, you're probably better off in Europe.

[la_oveja]

I live in northern Spain, and I have a website that entering my SS number I can schedule an appointment tomorrow morning (14 hours from now). For FREE. And with good equipment, nothing to envy to private healthcare.

[mahd43]

Yep, then if 14 hours from now your doctor discovers you need to see a specialist, you're going to wait 2 months on average for that appointment.

[ceejayoz]

Waiting two months to see a specialist is pretty routine in the US, as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/sunday-review/long-waits-...

> For example, patients waited an average of 29 days nationally to see a dermatologist for a skin exam, 66 days to have a physical in Boston and 32 days for a heart evaluation by a cardiologist in Washington.

> The study found that 26 percent of 2,002 American adults surveyed said they waited six days or more for appointments, better only than Canada (33 percent) and Norway (28 percent), and much worse than in other countries with national health systems like the Netherlands (14 percent) or Britain (16 percent). When it came to appointments with specialists, patients in Britain and Switzerland reported shorter waits than those in the United States, but the United States did rank better than the other eight countries.

[mahd43]

Politicians both across Europe and USA are often making exactly the same point and drawing exactly the opposite conclusions from it, but the details don't always paint the same picture.

In the USA they say we have capitalism and free markets and that is great, in Europe they have 'socialism' and that is bad. Or the Democrats sometimes make the point that something is better in Europe because it's run by the state and therefore not subject to corporate greed etc.

In Europe they same the same thing but inverted. In the states they have ruthless capitalism, they're all greedy, working long hours, shooting each other in the streets, homeless people everywhere. Europe is better because there's more regulation, more services ran by government monopolies, more fair, more "social".

But reality is never so black and white. The US is far from free-market competition in many markets and niches, although it's aggressively marketed as such all the time. And policies in Europe are often far from the "social" "we care for people not profits", and in fact empower small interest groups close to leading parties to profit in state monopolies and other types of dodgy weird stuff under the pretence that it's good and fair for the people.

When you look closely often Europe and America have similar problems, they're just marketed in a vastly different way.

[mahd43]

True, the US by no means has the best system overall, and some stuff is outright bad no doubt about it.

I'm just trying to say it's more complicated than Europe: free, good, public, fair for everyone USA: private, capitalistic, bad, unfair

Also 'Europe' as always is a vague term, there's a difference between Zurich Switzerland and some town in Serbia, Greece or Romania, but it's all Europe.

The U.S. health services for starters could be made cheaper by letting more foreign doctors in, but that has been lobbied against for years by the medical lobby itself on the grounds foreign doctors aren't as good, keeping salaries artificially high for many types of medical staff etc.