[dagw]

Americans really love eating up this meme.

As someone who lives in Sweden I can assure you that the 'meme' is 100% true here. There is no way you are getting an MRI unless it's literally life and death, without either waiting 4-6 month or having private health insurance.

[kwhitefoot]

As someone who lives in Norway (permanent resident) I'm quite surprised that Sweden is so bad. A couple of years ago I visited my GP complaining of a small hard swelling on my foot. he said it's probably just a ganglion and that he could fix it if it didn't improve by itself but that he would like an MRI scan first to check exactly what it looked like. It was obviously not even slightly urgent but I still got the scan with a month. In Norway such scans are normally performed at a specialist company (Unilabs in this case) even though it is all paid for by the health national service (except for about 150 NOK egenandel, that's about 15 USD copay)

https://unilabs.no/

[Auracle]

I'm in the US and have had multiple MRI scans happen either the same day as an appointment or the next. Compared to that, even a month seems pretty long.

[kwhitefoot]

It wasn't urgent, I wasn't in pain, there was no rush. If it is sufficiently urgent it's possible to get an MRI within minutes of arriving at a major hospital.

[Auracle]

It was the same for me. It was a "there's technically a small chance it might be a tumor of some kind, so we'll check just to make sure" type of deal.

[vidarh]

Consider that Americans tax payers pay about $5k/year on average for Medicare and Medicaid that most of them don't (yet) qualify for before they even starting to pay those private insurances. People in most other countries can pay a lot privately before getting close to what the average American tax payer pays for healthcare.

The point is that it's an option that is available. Most people in Europe just has a base level health coverage that means most of us don't feel it's justified to take up additional cover.

[dagw]

Yea, don't get me wrong. At the end of the day there is no way I would want to trade the Swedish system for the US system, no matter how flawed I find the Swedish system.