[petsagouris]

There is no free health care in Greece at the moment. Everyone pays to receive treatment from the public health care system even if you pay your health care insurance monthly fees.

Furthermore the free education is a hugely false fact. For almost 20 years now if a child is not getting education outside of the public school system he/she will not be getting anywhere close to getting onto the 3rd educational level (College or University). The funding and the personnel is inadequate to say the least.

Mind you the public sector is governed by the 5-out-1-in rule (5 people leave 1 gets assigned a position) in general but in the education sector this analogy is rounding up to 10-out-1-in.

[flexie]

Yes, it's hard to maintain free healthcare and free education like in Northern or Western Europo when Greeks pay little or no tax.

As I understand it unemployed Greeks receive free health care for up to one year. After that period, patients must pay for their own treatment. That's still more than many places in the US.

The fact that public education is (often?) so bad that private tutor schools are needed to enter university doesn't change the fact that education is mostly free in Greece.

[pyriku]

Excuse me, but the welfare systems are public, not free. We pay for them with our taxes. At least in Spain, education and health system are public, not free.