Darth Wong wrote:You can't justify everything you say by the fact that you live there. By your own admission, you've never needed any serious medical care, yet you rant about how awful the waiting times are for serious medical care in your country. What makes you any more specially qualified to discuss that than anyone else with a web browser?
No I can't justify everything I say by just saying I live here. However, since I do live in one of the few states on Earth that call themselves Welfare States. I can provide the point of view of a person who lives and works in a Welfare State. Which has been my point. The waiting times for medical care and the general criticism towards the state of Public Health Care are both from own experience (parents, grandparents) and from the mouths of people who work on the Health Care sector here and ofcourse the media.
Also, you're still ignoring the point: you have not tried living in one of the laissez-faire capitalist paradises you obviously wish you were in, so what makes you think it would be better? In fact, all you've done is grouse about how awful it is to live in the country that makes the #1 rank on all of the UN's HDI rankings, but you've done so in isolation. It's like a government unionized worker complaining about how hard his life is.
No I haven't. My point was never to actually compare Finland to capitalist paradises. If my first post gives that impression, then I apologize. Ah, no. I have absolutely no wish to live in the US for example. Nor really anywhere except Finland. The fact that there are many things in my own opinion which are simply wrong with our current system does not mean that I would abandon my home in a heartbeat. Statistics are statistics, experiences are another thing entirely. Only by living in another country you get to really know what kind of place that country is.
Edi wrote:
Medicines, books, transportation of people and some other things have a VAT of 8%. Food VAT drops to 12% in October this year. Otherwise correct.
Conceded, it was a bit too broad of a generalization. The food VAT should have dropped ages ago and I was discussing the present situation.
It would help a lot if you stated this kind of special caveats from the get-go, because otherwise it makes it look like you're skewing the figures to look better for your argument. Besides that, it's not comparable to anything, unless you can do a similar calculation for any other country you wish to compare to. I wonder what that would look like.
Uh, what I said in the 6,000$ figure in the first place:
Me wrote:The average cost of our "free" health care for every working person is 6,000$ a year. On top of that, if you have to use that health care for ANY reason you have to pay for it. Nevermind the fact that you are already paying 6000$ a year for it in taxes.
The figure wasn't intended to be comparable to anything. It was meant to provide an idea how much our current health care arrangement costs per working person. Plus the costs of Doctor appointments etc.
Yeah, that may have been your intention, but where the fuck am I living then? At the end of the rainbow with leprechauns and Fluffy the Purple Unicorn? I live in this country too and I've had to use the social services and my experience has not been anywhere near what you describe, nor have I heard it being that bad for anyone I know.
Well good for you. I don't see the point of debating our experiences in this instance. You haven't had the opportunity to hit the big bumps in our Welfare State System.
My sister is just a year and a half younger than I am, meaning she's past 30. The hospital stay was this year.
This is indeed quite fascinating. I admit that our experiences differ greatly.
It's not perfect, but it sure as fuck ain't as broken as you make it sound. I don't know if it's just the office where you filed your paperwork that fucked up, but that's a distinct possibility. If there was a systemic problem like you describe, it wouldn't just be suppressed. It doesn't take more than one or two fuckups in one office to snarl everything for a lot of people, since as government workers, they are almost fucking impossible to fire. The nice thing about our system is that filing a complaint into the administrative courts doesn't cost almost anything and it sure sounds like you have a case if everything was fucked up that bad. Though of course if it's been long ago, the statute of limitations on it has expired.
Sure, could have been the office. The funny thing is that neither KELA nor Työvoimatoimisto have managed to actually perform when they should have. Since fuckups with these two prodigious offices have been the rule rather than the exception in me or my relatives dealings with these two offices (situated in Turku, Tampere, Lempäälä), forgive me if I don't really have much faith in their ability to accomplish squat. Administrative courts don't cost much, but the time and effort you need to put into those proceedings is beyond the benefits. In my instance, I was spending enough time as it was trying to get re-employed and keeping my apartment to go to court over 1000€. I did ultimately get a new job and decided that never the fuck again I would deal with those two offices if I could avoid it. My mother actually had to go to court over living support, since KELA had decided she was a agricultural enterpeneur. The courts ultimately overruled KELA after two years of arguing, and my mother got the 69€ living support.
It is supposed to be subsistence level support and it has been a fucking long time since it's been reindexed to reflect reality, which means it is often a bit short.
Yeah, it's supposed to be that. The fact is that it doesn't actually reflect the minimal costs of living for a single person in any way. So, if you actually get unemployed suddenly, you're far safer in trusting either a Union or a private unemployment fund.
And was this always at the same office? Paperwork does get lost in the shuffle and I don't know if it's a specific malady in the Tampere offices, but in Helsinki it has worked quite well. I might have had to resubmit one form once, during several years when I had to deal with the bureaucracy on and off depending on whether I had work or not.
The first time it was the Hervanta office, the second time we mailed the paperwork over there. The point is that the system, that's supposed to help you when you hit a bad streak of luck out of a sudden, fails due to incompetence and fails to FIX the mistake. Mind you, this is a minor problem when looked at from a broader perspective. For the unlucky unemployed fucker hitting this bump, its a big goddamn problem.
Time for another counter-anecdote: I've required medical attention necessitating a hospital stay three times in the past eleven years, for a major surgical procedure. The first two operations failed in the healing phase when certain stitches didn't hold. Those were on the public side and it was a non-urgent (from the system's point of view) operation and it cost me fucking nothing.
The third time I had it done privately, because then the waiting time would have been years precisely due to the non-critical (i.e. not life threatening or seriously debilitating condition) status of the problem. It was successful due to not using automatically dissolving stitches in the critical locations. That particular thing cost something like 4000 euros for the operation and all the associated costs for it and none of that was covered by insurance. It didn't require an overnight hospital stay, as opposed to the public side. If it had, it would have been more.
The wait times on the public side for urgent stuff are not nearly as bad as you make it sound, but non-urgent stuff gets shunted back if higher priority cases appear. That's how the resource allocation works.
It seems that public health care has completely different billing practices in Helsinki than in Tampere. The bills I've archived from the times I've used the public health care services atleast would seem to speak in favor of that. What I do find odd though is that your health insurance didn't cover the cost of the operation in a private establishment.
My critique towards the waiting times are a result of the countless reports in our media and experiences from my relatives and friends. Ofcourse, this could be different in Helsinki.
If you're going to make sweeping generalizations based on your own personal experiences when it's not supported by easily available data, expect to be challenged. That's how shit works here.
To be frank, you've had bad experiences and you rant on them, but when you fucking get counter-examples from people living in the same country, you stop doing sweeping generalizations or you'll get your ass beaten like a drum.
Personal experiences, those of relatives, those of friends. Long time working in the private sector and working with people who are responsible for training the people in charge of our elderly care, school system and health care system.
Counter-examples? What the fuck man, the fact that you've got good experiences with our Government doesn't magically somehow disqualify the examples of broken parts I've provided. You've managed to show that something Government-run systems work in Helsinki. Congratulations!
"The ones they built at the height of nuclear weapons could knock the earth out of its orbit" - Physics expert Envy in reference to the hydrogen bombs built during the cold war.
Wow, that's pretty sweet. Your student discount is incredible too, here in Switzerland it's between (I can't remember exactly) 10 and 20%, but that's for all public transit in the country. Do a lot of people attend university (like in North America), or relatively few (say, less than 50% of highschool graduates)?
). The primary draw was more that I've always wanted to visit Sweden, but now the job market sucks and what better reason to go than to get a more impressive degree?
