ECSNorway Wrote:So, Catty, how much choice is there for private insurance, and how good is the quality of coverage? How much does it cost? My psoriasis treatments cost (my insurer) upwards of $30k/year, would the Danish government healthcare pay that? Or would they deem it a "cosmetic" problem and dismiss it, as I had one insurer try to in the past?ECSNorway, despite what you may have heard (and I can't imagine what source it might have been, really!), in the portion of the first world that has publically funded health care, i.e., "every first world country that isn't the United States", people do not get tossed out of hospitals or denied treatment because their conditions aren't important enough. There is no systematic mechanism to accomplish this, and the few times something like that happens for whatever reason (almost always "not enough thorough testing was done, patient sent home, undiscovered condition kills patient", which happens in the US too), public outrage ensures those responsible pay for it. The main issues with publically funded health care tend to be when political parties cut funding to it, which does not lead to people not getting care, but instead leads to infrastructural problems, notably attempts to increase the throughput of patients so they are not taking up scarce hospital beds. As well, there tends to be a shortage of doctors in rural areas, leading to longer trips or difficulty in finding a family doctor. While not ideal, none of this results in the actual denial of care - which is one of the many, many reasons why people in countries with publically funded health care are generally healthier, live longer, et cetera, than people in the United States.
Doctors in a publically funded health care system do not generally have any financial incentive in not providing treatment - they get paid to work, and they have far more to lose from dismissing a patient than from treating them regardless of their personal opinion of the patient's condition. Insurers are exactly the opposite - their entire livelihood depends on paying out as little as possible to as few people as possible (and in the United States, it has come out that several health insurers did in fact specifically pay out bonuses for people finding ways to deny payment to claimants). Your paranoia over the effects of a publically funded health care system are not only based on a fundamental misunderstanding of free market incentives, but also fly in the fact of the statistical evidence of virtually every country with publicly-funded health care, which is an awful lot of evidence to swim against.