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Granted. You blink, and when you open your eyes you’re in Germany. You’re a full German citizen. You own a lovely flat in Munich. Your phone is full of contacts - people and family and friends throughout Germany. You have a German driver’s license, you have a job at a German company, and your bank account is filled with Euros.
You speak no German.
You know all those news stories you hear about “Person wakes up and can only speak a language they never knew before”. That’s the cover story for these events.
German man wakes up, can only speak English.
Which is largely fine, as most Germans speak English.
I 100% thought that twist was going in a different direction. Other than getting fired in fairly short order, this sounds kind of fun and exciting.
I honestly wouldn’t mind this.
You later find out you’re Jason Bourne.
Granted. You didn’t define the word “free”. Everything now costs so much more, and it’s all unregulated. Doctors perform surgeries that aren’t necessary. They prescribe extremely harmful drugs. Going to a doctor is now just as risky as trying to deal with the disease by yourself. There are doctors on every street corner offering cures that don’t work, and you can’t tell the difference between a good doctor and a quack.
Pharmaceutical companies now freely and openly push doctors to prescribe more drugs that don’t work. They increase prices astronomically. Even an Advil costs over $100.
The death rate increases, and everyone tries to deal with their dead themselves because having a hospital deal with bodies is too expensive. This leads to an even further spread of disease.
Granted, your free healthcare system is homeopathic and your surgeon general is Gwynneth Paltrow. But it’s completely free!
My greatest fear
Granted. If you choose to participate your likeness, fingerprints, dna, medical history, and potential children naming rights now belong to some tech startup without proper data security.
Granted. It is free but the wait time is longer than your lifetime.
Granted - Free euthanasia for any- and everyone, quick, painless, and guaranteed no sick people!
Granted! Free healthcare for everyone to homeopaths and crystal healers!
Granted, but it’s only for the ruling class
Granted. You now lose 35% of your income before you even receive it even paycheck, foreigners often get attended to despite not having submitted any of their paychecks, there’s always a significant waiting list for anything serious upto multiple years for something like a hip replacement and you’ll commonly find yourself wishing you had a it more income like your wealthier friends so you could afford to pay for private care and get a significantly better experience.
He asked for a new system, he didn’t ask for a description of what we already have.
He asked for free healthcare in his country. I described what it looks like everywhere else as well as what the uneducated think “free” is. Seems I hit some nerves.
You didn’t hit nerves, we’re just laughing at you because you fundamentally misunderstand healthcare outside the United states.
Don’t mistake mockery for anger. I, personally, feel sorry for you.
As someone not from the US and from one of those systems, that’s exactly how it works but enjoy your copium. Or, you know, tell me what’s so “fundamentally” misunderstood? After all, laughing and pointing achieves nothing if you’re trying to prove someone wrong.
At least here, you don’t usually pay for private healthcare yourself, your insurance does. And because private healthcare can and does limit their services and usually avoids the most costly patient groups, insurance is cheap compared to the US (abt 500€/year for 42F), if you want it. US is in a league of its own in how much people end up paying for healthcare, and they have god-awful population level results to show for it.
Sure the wait times can be long, usually not years though. But what horrifies me is that there are rich countries where the wait time can be infinite for some people.
