Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jeofken 977 days ago
In CH I can go to a different doctor if I don’t like one. They run their own businesses. It’s their incentive to take me. It’s amazing!!! Totally normal to everyone from here.

I just go on OneDoc and select one according to my preferences. Unbelievable!! I use CSS in Wallis and I can email and call them and get a reply very fast. I have the direct phone number of my guy at the insurance office. Maybe a perk of village living. To them I’m a client rather than an annoyance, unlike with Försäkringskassan in SE. If I wasn’t satisfied, I could select another one. Not quite possible in a socialist health care system.
1 comments
nairboon 977 days ago
Health care in CH is still public, even if most actors are private companies. The baseline cost are shared socially. That's why the premiums increase every year.
link
rayiner 977 days ago
It’s not any more public than in America. Individuals pay their own health insurance premiums. Individuals who don’t have enough money can receive a subsidy from the canton: https://www.ch.ch/en/health/health-insurance/health-insuranc.... That’s exactly how Obamacare works. The cap at which the subsidy kicks in is almost the same, too: 8% of income in CH, 8.5% under Obamacare.

And on top of that the US has a fully publicly funded system, Medicaid.

link
TMWNN 977 days ago
Thank you for beating me to the punch regarding the Swiss system vis-a-vis the US post-Obamacare. The mental gymnastics that people (not just here, but on Reddit and online in general) resort to to maintain their presupposition that the US system is completely unique (and thus "capitalist"/"not socialist") compared to the rest of the world get very tiresome.

A huge contributor to the confusion in US discussion of the issue comes from the fact that the two countries we are closest to, Canada and UK, both have free-at-use systems. Too many Americans think that all other developed countries' systems are "100% free" and "just like the NHS", when they are arguably more the aberration when compared to DACH's sickness funds, France's 30% copays, and the Australian system that really, really, really encourages going private. This creates a weird feedback loop in which residents of other countries, in turn, get confused about their own systems when compared to the US's.

link