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A comment on The cost of two weeks in an pediatric/infant ICU. Parent comment

Re:The cost of two weeks in an pediatric/infant ICU by hef19898 on Thursday July 29, 2021 @09:04AM (#27996008)
The countries I have direct experience with, France and Germany, don't have any issues with people dying while waiting for procedures. Experts are usually readily available, so there are exceptions.

I don't know of any public health care system in developed countries that have really these issues. I do know so, that a lot of that comes from a PR campaign run by US insurances against the Canadian system.

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Re:The cost of two weeks in an pediatric/infant ICU by Y_Y on Thursday July 29, 2021 @09:41AM (#27996406)
When you say they don't have any issues, do you mean it doesn't happen?

I'm more familiar with the Spanish, Irish and UK systems. I tried to find a nice document giving numbers for what I was describing, but most of what I can find is anecdotal, and the official reports are weren't quantitative.

Here's an article from an Irish newspaper last year that gives a rough guess (though of course there are other factors): https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/are-patient-waiting-l...

I'm certainly open to US insurance companies paying me to shill on hn against Canadian healthcare, but right now I'm only saying these things out of the goodness of my heart.

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Re:The cost of two weeks in an pediatric/infant ICU by hef19898 on Thursday July 29, 2021 @09:52AM (#27996542)
Waiting times do happen, usually end of quarters when the quarterly budget runs out. No issues in so far as these waiting times don't affect emergency procedures.

And no, I don't see a direct link between public health care and wait times. The German issues are mostly caused by a bloated bureaucracy.

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Re:The cost of two weeks in an pediatric/infant ICU by Y_Y on Thursday July 29, 2021 @10:32AM (#27997018)
I think we're pretty much in agreement then. Emergency procedures don't have long waiting times in any of these nice European countries. (Of course, even in the US they will give some urgent life-saving care to someone who can't pay.)

I also think that these (some several year) wait times aren't unavoidable. Management of these national public health systems is fabulously complicated and difficult and expensive, but it could certainly be done much better. In the end I think a country that really wanted to, and was willing to pay, could have a public system at least as good as what a 1%er in the US gets.

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Re:The cost of two weeks in an pediatric/infant ICU by hef19898 on Thursday July 29, 2021 @10:53AM (#27997239)
Absolutely in agreement. IMHO in Germany the main reason is budget, defined quarterly. So of course a Doctor might push out appointments to the next quarter if he can when he ran out of budget already. And the ratio by which doctors practices are assigned and planned. That leads to an abundance in cities and a shortage elsewhere. And that imbalances cam, and do, drive wait times up. Going from experience so, it got better.

Theoretically I could switch to Germany's private insurance scheme. I have no willingness to do so.

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