On: The French way of cancer treatment

[danielhunt]

I'll be the first to admit ignorance on the Medicaid fiasco in the US, but stories like this really drive home the difference between European and US mentalities to healthcare

Being Irish, I'm used to a public healthcare system that, while slow and filled with red tape, does actually work. Private health insurance is expensive and quickly becoming something that can mean the difference between paying your mortgage or not, but still is seemingly better than whatever is going on across the pond

Definitely worth a read, if only to highlight the stark difference in approaches.

[masklinn → danielhunt]

And of course US healthcare is no faster and no less filled with red tape, unless you have significant amount of money (and even then, the red tape of having to negotiate with and coordinate care actors still falls on the patient or their family)

[davidw → masklinn]

Oddly enough, here in Italy, regular doctor visits have very little red tape. They just type your name in their computer, and then get on with asking what you are there to see them for. If you need a prescription, they print one out for you, that you can take to the pharmacy.

By and large, Italy is not a stellar example of how to run a country, but the health care system is less bureaucratic and easier to deal with than the US, and generally not something you have to worry about much.

That said, it's not perfect, either. When our son was born here, it felt very much like a factory operation with the pregnant woman as an input and a woman+child as the output. I felt they were competent in the event that anything went wrong (in our case, everything was fine), but it was all very impersonal and felt designed to maximize throughput. I was not allowed to be with my wife for most of her labor, for instance.