Our conservative party would like to quit public healthcare and go into a system with health insurances and only private, for-profit hospitals.
That’s exactly what they did here in Germany, and it’s as bad as you can imagine. 2nd class citizens (those who can’t afford or aren’t healthy enough to switch to private insurance) have to wait anything between 4 to 14 months on doctor’s appointments, the hospitals are chronically underfunded (but apparently very profitable), yet we pay hundreds of euros per month. Some specialists basically do not exist for the 2nd class (the few that still do it have zero appointments or are burned out). The usual waiting time for therapy is between 1 (if lucky) and 3 years. Doctors can’t freely prescribe everything they deem necessary as some things might cause claims for compensation by the insurance years later. Or the other way around, they’re enticed to prescribe “specific stuff” just to keep their “business” (the doctors office) afloat, since doctors only get paid once for each patient every quarter. The second appointment within 3 months already makes your doc work for free. Oh, also one appointment is deemed to be only 5 minutes long by insurances. In some regions you can’t even find a General Practitioner anymore, let alone a hospital. It’s deemed “unprofitable” there.
Hell, when I was in hospital there were about 5 nurses for up to 32 cancer (!) patients with up to 8 of them in isolation rooms (including me for a while). At night there was ONE nurse (looked like a refugee desperate for a job) for the WHOLE station. During chemo the bladder doesn’t work too well, I had to call the nurse and waited about 25 minutes in the middle of the night next to a wet bed after scrambling for clean clothes before he stormed in, changed the whole bed in 60 seconds without saying anything and storming back out. I’ll never forget that, if I was still capable to feel a lot inbetween pain, dizzyness and nausea I would’ve felt incredibly alone.
There’s only one thing all of this causes, which is more money for rich people and higher numbers on stock markets. If they push that shit through you’ll suffer.
That’s exactly what they did here in Germany, and it’s as bad as you can imagine. 2nd class citizens (those who can’t afford or aren’t healthy enough to switch to private insurance) have to wait anything between 4 to 14 months on doctor’s appointments, the hospitals are chronically underfunded (but apparently very profitable), yet we pay hundreds of euros per month. Some specialists basically do not exist for the 2nd class (the few that still do it have zero appointments or are burned out). The usual waiting time for therapy is between 1 (if lucky) and 3 years. Doctors can’t freely prescribe everything they deem necessary as some things might cause claims for compensation by the insurance years later. Or the other way around, they’re enticed to prescribe “specific stuff” just to keep their “business” (the doctors office) afloat, since doctors only get paid once for each patient every quarter. The second appointment within 3 months already makes your doc work for free. Oh, also one appointment is deemed to be only 5 minutes long by insurances. In some regions you can’t even find a General Practitioner anymore, let alone a hospital. It’s deemed “unprofitable” there.
Hell, when I was in hospital there were about 5 nurses for up to 32 cancer (!) patients with up to 8 of them in isolation rooms (including me for a while). At night there was ONE nurse (looked like a refugee desperate for a job) for the WHOLE station. During chemo the bladder doesn’t work too well, I had to call the nurse and waited about 25 minutes in the middle of the night next to a wet bed after scrambling for clean clothes before he stormed in, changed the whole bed in 60 seconds without saying anything and storming back out. I’ll never forget that, if I was still capable to feel a lot inbetween pain, dizzyness and nausea I would’ve felt incredibly alone.
There’s only one thing all of this causes, which is more money for rich people and higher numbers on stock markets. If they push that shit through you’ll suffer.
I’m very sorry to hear this, I hope you’re better now! And that kind of system seems to be what they aim for here. I don’t see why they’d ever fail.