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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Waiting two months to see a specialist is pretty routine in the US, as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/sunday-review/long-waits-...

> For example, patients waited an average of 29 days nationally to see a dermatologist for a skin exam, 66 days to have a physical in Boston and 32 days for a heart evaluation by a cardiologist in Washington.

> The study found that 26 percent of 2,002 American adults surveyed said they waited six days or more for appointments, better only than Canada (33 percent) and Norway (28 percent), and much worse than in other countries with national health systems like the Netherlands (14 percent) or Britain (16 percent). When it came to appointments with specialists, patients in Britain and Switzerland reported shorter waits than those in the United States, but the United States did rank better than the other eight countries.

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Politicians both across Europe and USA are often making exactly the same point and drawing exactly the opposite conclusions from it, but the details don't always paint the same picture.

In the USA they say we have capitalism and free markets and that is great, in Europe they have 'socialism' and that is bad. Or the Democrats sometimes make the point that something is better in Europe because it's run by the state and therefore not subject to corporate greed etc.

In Europe they same the same thing but inverted. In the states they have ruthless capitalism, they're all greedy, working long hours, shooting each other in the streets, homeless people everywhere. Europe is better because there's more regulation, more services ran by government monopolies, more fair, more "social".

But reality is never so black and white. The US is far from free-market competition in many markets and niches, although it's aggressively marketed as such all the time. And policies in Europe are often far from the "social" "we care for people not profits", and in fact empower small interest groups close to leading parties to profit in state monopolies and other types of dodgy weird stuff under the pretence that it's good and fair for the people.

When you look closely often Europe and America have similar problems, they're just marketed in a vastly different way.

True, the US by no means has the best system overall, and some stuff is outright bad no doubt about it.

I'm just trying to say it's more complicated than Europe: free, good, public, fair for everyone USA: private, capitalistic, bad, unfair

Also 'Europe' as always is a vague term, there's a difference between Zurich Switzerland and some town in Serbia, Greece or Romania, but it's all Europe.

The U.S. health services for starters could be made cheaper by letting more foreign doctors in, but that has been lobbied against for years by the medical lobby itself on the grounds foreign doctors aren't as good, keeping salaries artificially high for many types of medical staff etc.

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