I know the general gist of the situation. Low spending from domestic households, real estate bubble, excessive government influence on industry scaring investors, and so on.
My problem with it is that most headlines make it sound like it’s all gonna implode spectacularly tomorrow. The articles themselves usually paint a more reasonable picture of the situation, similar to your comment. But most people don’t read the article. They just see the headline over and over.
Economics and politics are not spectacles shock-jocks and media can ride and clickbait you on. It’s numbers moving very slowly in one direction or another. (I mean actual politics, where people do things, debate and make laws, not where people tweet things. Despite the spectacle around politics, how many people watch legislative proceedings?)
I lived in Hungary, and it was like that with the “healthcare is going to collapse” thing. There was a loud cry that it was going to happen, and the government was always saying it doesn’t, as it’s still working. But year after year it got worse.
Hospitals look more and more dilapidated. In more and more places you have to bring some supplies like iodine and toilet paper because hospitals are running out. Wait times went up slowly, urgent surgeries might be scheduled so far out that you’ll die by the time you get care. Unless you know people, or your case is treated as an actual urgent case, then you get in the “red notebook” that officially does not exist, and you get care earlier. Hospital infections are killing thousands. My GP went from having to wait 30 mins, to having to wait hours, to having to schedule days in advance to not picking up the phone for weeks.
It’s a slow boil, and even now, when you can hardly get care for a traffic accident, and most semi-respectable big companies offer private healthcare subscriptions as a benefit, and the government is telling people that they should budget some money away for medical expenses (tax you pay specifically for this is 11% of your income by the way), even now people are saying that “see? Healthcare didn’t implode!”. I guess the hospitals didn’t burn down yet. I don’t know what they expect to happen.
If it makes you feel better, that’s about the tax than I pay in America for health insurance that I don’t get. I still pay $500USD per month on top of the taxes for private insurance too.
Yeah I got G E K O L O N I S E E R D in the meantime, so I’m doing fine. Did you know that the Netherlands has privatized healthcare like the US? Except ours is tightly regulated, so I pay a 100 EUR premium and no additional costs at all, no copays, no maximums, nothing out of scope, and I get quality healthcare.
I know the general gist of the situation. Low spending from domestic households, real estate bubble, excessive government influence on industry scaring investors, and so on.
My problem with it is that most headlines make it sound like it’s all gonna implode spectacularly tomorrow. The articles themselves usually paint a more reasonable picture of the situation, similar to your comment. But most people don’t read the article. They just see the headline over and over.
Economics and politics are not spectacles shock-jocks and media can ride and clickbait you on. It’s numbers moving very slowly in one direction or another. (I mean actual politics, where people do things, debate and make laws, not where people tweet things. Despite the spectacle around politics, how many people watch legislative proceedings?)
I lived in Hungary, and it was like that with the “healthcare is going to collapse” thing. There was a loud cry that it was going to happen, and the government was always saying it doesn’t, as it’s still working. But year after year it got worse.
Hospitals look more and more dilapidated. In more and more places you have to bring some supplies like iodine and toilet paper because hospitals are running out. Wait times went up slowly, urgent surgeries might be scheduled so far out that you’ll die by the time you get care. Unless you know people, or your case is treated as an actual urgent case, then you get in the “red notebook” that officially does not exist, and you get care earlier. Hospital infections are killing thousands. My GP went from having to wait 30 mins, to having to wait hours, to having to schedule days in advance to not picking up the phone for weeks.
It’s a slow boil, and even now, when you can hardly get care for a traffic accident, and most semi-respectable big companies offer private healthcare subscriptions as a benefit, and the government is telling people that they should budget some money away for medical expenses (tax you pay specifically for this is 11% of your income by the way), even now people are saying that “see? Healthcare didn’t implode!”. I guess the hospitals didn’t burn down yet. I don’t know what they expect to happen.
If it makes you feel better, that’s about the tax than I pay in America for health insurance that I don’t get. I still pay $500USD per month on top of the taxes for private insurance too.
Yeah I got G E K O L O N I S E E R D in the meantime, so I’m doing fine. Did you know that the Netherlands has privatized healthcare like the US? Except ours is tightly regulated, so I pay a 100 EUR premium and no additional costs at all, no copays, no maximums, nothing out of scope, and I get quality healthcare.