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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

Problem is that sometimes you have to wait even for actually critical things - friend's mom waited almost 2 months for her cancer operation. In US if you've got money you're more or less covered, while in Europe the difference is that in some (admittedly rare) situations even if you earn well you're screwed just like everyone else.

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You can get private insurance in Europe if you want.

Yeah, I pay less than 1k/yr for fancy private health insurance in Europe.

What do you mean by fancy?

Medevac, top tier hospitals around the world (except US, lol) in network.

Trauma Team too?

Covered, but availability unsurprisingly depends on if the care provider decides to activate it.

Hmm, I mean the Cyberpunk one. Your insurance must really be good.

Haha, I wondered about that. Providers like Cigna and Bupa are the big ones in this space. Intl insurance is sooo much cheaper than US ones.

You can, but you need to think about it ahead. And no one expects the Spanish inquisition...

At least in the UK, private hospitals tend to focus on basic care or routine surgeries. Once you have a more complicated or urgent case you'll end up in a publicly funded (NHS) hospital anyway. Which means that in the end, anyone independent of income has access to the best doctors, criticality of their illness decides who gets to see them, not money.

In Europe, urgent surgery can be performed same day. The reason many people have to wait is because it's not time critical so others will get surgery first. Having a system where anyone (with the right amount of money) could get complicated surgery without wait times sounds incredibly inefficient as you need much more capacity than necessary.

Europe is a whole damn continent, so no, it's not true. It's not true even for the entire EU. I happen to live in Croatia which is in EU, and I know first hand that in Romania and Bulgaria health system situation is even worse, as I spent some time there. You get urgent operations like if you're in car accident and you're brought into the ER, of course they'll not let you bleed out. But if you need, say, heart aortic valves replaced (happened to my mom), or anything else a bit more advanced, you end up on the waiting list, and unless you pull connections and give bribe that means months of waiting.

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