Only to point this out...because the US media won’t touch the story. Over the past six months...there’s been this mess openly discussed in Germany over public hospitals losing money.
After decades of having the local states fund the maintenance, repair and new construction of hospitals throughout Germany (public, not private)....the trend was halted in the last year because the states just don’t have the money anymore to do so, and there was no law dictating they had to do it.
Well...the hospitals are at a loss to move ahead with any plan on taking care of what they have. The people who control the purse strings of the national healthcare funds...have decided to hand out a one-time ‘bonus’ of one billion dollars. It’s enough to buy everyone about a year of time before the true answer emerges.
What the public is grasping in Germany...is that around sixty percent of all German public hospitals are unable to sustain themselves. The solution? So far, it’s believed that if they take out roughly 1/3 of all public hospitals...the remaining ones might be able to survive. So if you lived within ten minutes of a current hospital....you might find yourself in a new position in four years....where the nearest hospital is forty minutes away. A decade from now....maybe even sixty minutes away by car.
No matter how we all think of things....medicine is now a business, and cost will end up being the bottom line.
It’s been more and more about the bottom line for years and due to litigation and soaring malpractice insurance, the patients (us) have seen our costs soar also. I’m sure you know the ER’s are full of people who use it as their new base for their primary care. About the only way to jump to the head of the line at an ER anymore is by arriving in an ambulance and in the major population centers the indigents (are we “allowed” to call them that anymore?) know this so 911 gets called for someone with chest pains.......... Sad but true, we’ll end up like Great Britain and their socialized medical system. Or worse.