Posted on 05/06/2017 5:43:53 AM PDT by PeaRidge
My friend, who lived in France for five years, and now in US, thinks our new health system is not only unnecessarily inadequate, but unsophisticated.
She says that in France that:
You get immediate appointments
Immediate treatment
World class results
Mideast sheiks go there
Relatively low cost meds (if you have to pay at all)
Latest improvements
All Free
To pay for this, she says All French citizens pay taxes.
Everyone pays the same percentage tax....35%
One page tax filing
To fellow Freepers......truth please.
“Friend Who Lived in France Says Their Health System Superior”
Take two bottles of wine and call me in the morning.
Don’t forget the VAT.
That’s not what the numbers show. The state show we have the lowest quality and the highest costs.
the entire system from top to bottom is rotten to the core. I blame the gov’t because everything the gov’t touches ends ups a cesspool of failure.
We used to have a medical industry that was the worlds best and it’s cost 5% of GDP. After 55 years of heavy gov’t “help” quality is ranked below Costa Rica & costs are 19% of GDP.
Princess Diana bled out on the side of the road. She would have lived with American EMS and any trauma center found in any American city.
That’s a fact. The wreck happened at 12:23.
Cops arrive at 12:30.
She wasn’t pinned in wreckage, but they didn’t get her out until 01:00.
Then it takes them 18 more minutes to get her INTO the ambulance.
23 minutes later at 01:41 they decide, hey, this looks serious, we better get her to the hospital.
Then she arrives at the hospital at 02:06. Almost 2 hours after the wreck.
Folks, that was a princess, freaking British Royalty, in Paris, with unlimited cash. SO don’t tell me how wonderful French healthcare is.
They end up going to places like the Cleveland Clinic.Especially for heart surgery.
So will you be going to Costa Rica God forbid you fall ill? I’ll stay in NYC, thank you.
Some good points you make. I do remember there was criticism here over the fact she was treated in the EMS vehicle rather than driven quickly to the hospital.
Free? Seriously? Your friend is a fool to believe it’s free. Everyone is paying for it out of their paycheck. Every paycheck for so long as they work. If she can’t figure that out, maybe she should go back to France. The USA already has more than it’s fair share of stupid people.
Agreed.
Let’s just say that the Frogs have an interesting way of treating cardiac tamponade.
“Folks who have gone to India for some of these low cost surgeries find out real quick that sanitation standards and medical expertise come at a cost. Low price does not mean good care.”
Just like anything, low or high price doesn’t necessarily translate to good quality. However, I’m still paying off a $5000 MRI that had I known, I could’ve flown to India, Japan, or many othe nations and had the exact same MRI done for a couple hundred bucks, and even with the travel expenses, still would’ve paid about a third as much. It’s like that with many simple procedures or tests here. Ridiculous.
If I’d been paying 35% tax when I was working,I’d have had to take all my meals & spend most of my time in the hospital to live on what was left.
It's possible that most people are in the 30% tax bracket, but there are others.
France doesn't have a flat tax.
Plus, there is a national sales tax or VAT on most purchases.
A few years ago I read the transcript of some legislative meeting on health care. They were trying to solve the problems of poor care in the counties out in the country. It was pretty amazing.
The one quote I remember was something like “The average wait time for a hearing test in the farm country is 14 months. We need to get them down to what a person in London waits, which on average is only 6 weeks.”
(For a hearing test!! And I’m sure I’m off on the wait times, but I know it was over a year in the rural areas, and over a month in London!)
Scrolled down through a few comments. This one made me wince a bit....
....here in Canada the doctors kill senior citizens with a drug that shuts down there organs when they are becoming too expensive to take care of....
😳😱
Brit’s have an extremely high cancer death rate. Highest in the industrialized nations They ration health care to the elderly. (Medicare, according to E.R. docs I know, we are starting do this here.)
I was told you can wait for a WEEK in an E.R. in the
U.K.
Medicine is going corporatist therefore CRAPITOLIST. Crony capitalist.
Inside the beltway corruption is way, way over the top. We snoozed and we loosed.
You are right. My gallbladder surgery was in the late 80s. Laparoscopy became available sometime after my Paris surgery.
I did have robotic surgery a few years ago for another problem. I believe it was an improvement over conventional laparoscopic surgery. It was sort of laparoscopy done with precise robotic control (forgive my non-MD description). Much simpler procedure and easier recovery than what I went through in Paris.
Had my gall bladder removed in 97. Outpatient laparoscope. I was home the same day. No recovery time
Another complication of my Paris gallbladder surgery was that about ten years later I had bile duct blockage from scar tissue from the earlier surgery. I gather that you can die in a day or so from bile duct blockage in some situations. My blockage caused me to shake like crazy as though I were extremely cold. I called a surgeon I knew, and he got me into the hospital ASAP. An endoscopic procedure was then used to burn a hole through the scar tissue.
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