Speaking or rather writing from his Swiss holiday ski resort retreat, Daniel Hannah has the usual go in the Telegraph at NHS bashing.
Basically, according to him, everyone else does it better and in particular the Swiss. I just did a research on Insurance prices in Switzerland and this was without paying any excess, not having any underlying health issues and was up to about 450 GBP monthly.
Remember this is on top of high taxes and other social security payments you have in Helvetia. Also what is often overlooked is that each person has to be insured individually. Germany, has a slightly different system where lower paid workers will have the entire family insured as long as their spouse/ partner is not also an employee. It gets really tough, now I can only speak from many years of actually living there and not being a tourist Mr. Hannan, if you are self employed. No employer contribution helping you there. So when I was 55 I was paying about £450 a month, wife, also self employed roughly £350 and each of the kids had a cheap £190 monthly charge, So quite a good deal setting me back only a thousand a month. But of course it is not all about costs. Hannan mentions waiting times. Good I have first hand experience in two countries. Here in Dorset: I have never waited more than twenty minutes in the surgery. In an emergency the ambulance was with me in 13 minutes. ECG taken and automatically stored in the NHS system for my doc to see. Medicine, covered, now, by the NHS. In Germany: When you go to a GP you will find they have two waiting areas or even rooms. Actually German law forbids doctors to priorities patients based on what they pay. I was lucky, privately insured. So I had a nice place under the window with the latest magazines instead of the wooden class where I would have been surrounded by lego bricks and possibly irritable children. Unfortunately it would seem half the country is privately insured so I can't remember ever writing for less than an hour as the private patients were dealt with. Of course the occasional non-private patient would be allowed to jump the queue. After all the law requires it. I can remember a few really bad incidents. One night I was in agony, throwing up with pain and drove to the local hospital. Not a small one by any means. One and a half times bigger than the Royal Bournemouth and twice the size of Dorset Count (DCHFT). They sent me away because they said there was nobody there to treat what I presumably had and I would have to drive the thirty miles to the next GP that was on duty that night. My second bad experience was after having an Angiogram in Coburg. This is a 500 bed place and partially specialised in angiograms. So I was told to lie flat with a weight on my groin until a doctor came to check that there was no bleeding. In the hospital that evening there was only one doctor who could check me and she was busy doing other things. I asked the night nurse, medicine in Germany is like the Bundeswehr, they only fight 9 till 5, and she told me she was not qualified to check that sort of thing and only a doctor could do it. Similar experience in Dorset? No way, highly qualified nursing staff who can make decisions. and don't require the gods in white to approve everything. Of course not everything in Germany is bad, the doctors seem to be excellent, the nursing staff quite friendly. But it all comes at a price. My last gripe would be the constant reminders that Germany and other European countries did better during Covid. There is only one word for that Bull****. In Germany it was everyman for himself getting the vaccinations. There is no central registry of patients as in the NHS. They have no records of which person is assigned to which GP. Of course once you called your GP for a jab his eyes lit up with Euro-Signs assuming he had a fridge full of vaccine, which was often lacking. A slight plus was that due to the privatisation there is an abundance of laboratories for medical testing who fairly quickly realised here was a lot of cash to be earned. There may well be several laboratories in one town. The disadvantage is that they never did any more than the test they were paid for. Here in the UK with a few centralised labs we soon were world leaders in detecting the new strains. I certainly feel safer in the UK and better treated all round.
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