As an American I’m curious what it’s like if you need to go to the doctor and how much you pay from say a broken arm to general checkup. Also list what country please
Spain. It’s free, as expected.
But quality have gone really down in the latest decade. To the point that I don’t actually feel really protected by it anymore.
Waiting lists are getting ridiculously long.
For a regular doctor you go to get a note for not working a few days can take a week or more to even see them. A specialist could easily take a year to see.
For this reason even we have free healthcare, more and more people is paying private healthcare on the side.
It’s not free, you pay for it with your taxes.
Free at the point of service.
But I suppose for people not paying taxes is free overall.
Hur hur you really got them there
A week? That’s fast in America.
The quickest I was able to be seen because of a major health scare was two weeks. When I hurt myself and needed physical therapy, the staff said with a straight face “Lets get you in as the first week is important for recovery. How is [date six weeks in advance]?”
One week for the primare care first appointment. The one that unless you have something very harmless wont be able to do anything for you anyway but refer to a specialist.
Physical therapy is one of the experts that could easily take 6 months to see.
One week is A LOT for health issues. It used to be that you could go in the same day, or the day after. But things have been going downhill for a while.
I have lived in several countries so I can give you a few answers:
Brazil:
You have two options, private which is generally expensive but fast and good and public which is free but usually slow and mediocre. Most people who can afford it use private, but public system is honestly quite good in some places. I lived in two different cities, on one of them you didn’t go to the public system unless it was an absolute emergency, because otherwise chances were you would come out worse, on the other city the public system was slow and under budgeted but very good otherwise, you would still prefer private if you could afford it, but people tight on money would use it, so you might do time insensitive stuff on the public system for example.
If you break your leg you would call an ambulance, get taken to a public hospital and be treated all free. You might have to wait on the hospital as people with graver injuries would be taken ahead of you.
Ireland:
There is a public system, but you have to earn below a certain threshold to be able to use it. Emergencies I think are covered for everyone, luckily I never had an emergency while living there so can’t speak from experience. You MUST have a GP, and most of them (at least in Dublin) are not taking new patients. Once you find a GP you must go through them to get to any specialist, for that you pay €60 and then you go to a consultation with them and they can decide whether to forward you to a specialist or not. If they forward you to a specialist you will have to pay their consultation fee, then pay for any exams, they pay to see the specialist again. All-in-all I’ve spent around €1000 trying to get a diagnosis once, luckily I had health insurance and it paid me back half.
Spain:
My wife twisted her ankle while visiting here as tourists, someone called an ambulance, it took us to the hospital, and after some wait se was seen and they did an x-ray, confirmed nothing was broken and gave her some special socks to prevent the joint from forcing too much. Because we forgot to bring our sanitary card from Ireland we had to pay for that, it was a total of €200.
We live here now, and since moving here a couple of years back we have gone through dozens of doctors and exams. I have a health plan from my company so this might not be the same for everyone, but I have never paid a single cent for anything, including X-rays, blood works, CAT scans, etc. Honestly I keep thinking at some point I will receive a huge bill from the health plan, but so far it has never happened.
The public system in Ireland is not tied to any income threshold. There is a nominal fee that is waived if you are unemployed, disabled, a part time worker, etc., but the public system is accessible to all.
German here. It’s all paid by my taxes. And when I go to the doctor I pay nothing, no matter what I have as long as its not a vanity issue.
If I want something unnecessary done I would have to pay myself. But injuries or illnesses are always fully covered.
Same for teeth, but there are bigger quality differences. Paying extra there for some actions taken is common.
No, it’s not all paid by our taxes, we literally have to pay insurance which is co-paid by our employer. The healthcare is universal because it’s mandatory to have insurance. If you’re unemployed you have to pay the full insurance yourself which is mind-boggling to me. The system is more similar to the US than true universal healthcare, because healthcare actors are private companies, doctors, and clinics getting reimbursed by insurances and the government.
What in Germany is called Steuer is not the same as taxes. Taxes are just the sum of your mandatory contributions from your gross income, including contributions for health care, pensions, public broadcasting, etc. Steuer is a part of your taxes.
The cost of “full insurance” is something like €500-1000, no one on Bürgergeld and few on Arbeitslosengeld are going to be able to afford that. Though you’re right that it doesn’t make any sense to have health care coverage tied to your employer when the insurance is mandatory for everyone anyway - that’s a bureaucratic relic from the past.
Health insurers for mandatory insurance in Germany are not private companies but semipublic nonprofits.
True. I was too lazy to differentiate it and check what “Sozialabgaben” is in English.
And we have to pay 10€ per day in hospital.
German here, too. Due to a long history I had to get all teeth pulled. It took months and several dentists but I got all teeth replaced. At the end I had to pay around 2.5K for everything. The rest came from my insurance. I also have ADHD and get Medikinet prescribed. Together with my “mood enhancer” pills, I pay around 11 euros per month.
Canada
I stayed with my parents for a few days when my grandmother died. I was sleeping on the couch and mom my noticed I wasn’t breathing at regular intervals. She said I should get a sleep test when I flew home on Sunday.
I called my doctor on Monday, had an appointment on Wednesday, he sent a referral and I got called on Friday that there was a cancellation that night if I could make to the sleep lab for a sleep test. I had no plans so I paid for parking outside the sleep lab for the night.
I got a call Monday that my test results were back, went to an appointment a few weeks later. Paid for parking again. Was given a trial CPAP to use until a got another sleep test with the machine to get a proper pressure level. I was told not to drive until that test. I paid for subways and busses until that test a week later.
I went for another sleep test, I paid for a taxi since I wasn’t allowed to drive.
I got a machine, a paid $700 dollars and a portion was covered by the govt and then my extended benefits covered the majority. I paid maybe $150 in the end for my machine because I didn’t get the basic model that would have been completely covered.
In all I paid less than 200 for the CPAP and for parking. Everything else was covered.
In the years since I have had about 6 more sleep tests and that is only because my sleep apnea is complex central sleep apnea not obstructive. I have paid nothing for any of those tests or heart and brain scans that were involved. Just the occasional parking near a hospital.
I’ve paid for CPAP machines and masks but had them reimbursed by my extended benefits through work. If I wasn’t covered through work they would still be covered to a certain amount through provincial medical coverage.
Netherlands
Good, I’d pay my “eigen risico” of a few hundred EUR - presuming I didn’t already spend it before then - but it’s slowly getting worse due to mass-migration (3x the historic percentage-points of the total population; that’s over 100k added on a population of 18 mil, even when that should be closer to 30k instead, historically speaking).
Serbia - but more specific to my town it seems.
By the time I was born, they already sabotaged universal healthcare to such near uselesness, that I was prescribed horse meat as a child to treat my immune defficiency.
It has only gotten worse since.
They just look up your diagnosis, and prescribe generic meds that you have to buy.
It’s rare that anything gets investigated or tested. All I can say is I had a mole removed for free, after an injury.
Canadian here… I had a boss who was American. He would often talk about how the American system was so much better then the Canadian system. This upset me but luckily I could go to the hospital and get my feelings checked for free.
The only people who actually think our system is better are total chodes who just inhale Fox News 24/7. Anyone with half a brain knows it’s utter shit and getting anything treated correctly is a major pain in the ass and potentially will bankrupt you. Fuck the American Healthcare System.
The American system is great… If you have money. As far as “public health care”, it is utter trash.
Canadian here I can fall off a ladder break my arm or a leg have a family member drive me to the hospital the doctor will place it cast it send me home and I won’t pay a cent. The things you do pay for parking, unnecessary ambulance rides, leg braces, wheelchairs, crutches, unnecessary medication not given to you, prescriptions
Netherlands: 2x stage 4 cancer with 10 years difference, so constant checkups, and of course the 2 treatments. we have “eigen risico” (own contribution) here (385 eur per year), and due to the many checkups I always max this out, but that’s pretty much where it ends, everything else is covered by the state (well, my state health insurance). the treatments were of course FoC, incl all the scans, the chemo, an operation, etc. i can not imagine the stress somebody without health insurance must have, when facing something like this. there are things that health insurance doesn’t cover or not fully: dentist i bought extra coverage for, fysiotherapy is only covered max 10x per year.
UK. It’s great, mostly. However it is underfunded which means you can have long wait times for non-urgent stuff. If a hospital referral sees you in a week or so you can take that as a sign that you are fucked. But it’s amazing not to have to fear financial ruin if I get sick. I think most UK taxpayers wouldn’t mind paying a little extra if it was ringfenced for the NHS. We need more medical staff and they need to be paid a lot better.
Edit - dental care can be pretty expensive though.
Yeah I don’t know how the NHS managed to shit the bed on dentistry so badly
I was a dental nurse for a while in my youth and NHS dental price bands were always so weird. Sometimes it was far cheaper to go private for some procedures that were within NHS band 2 but were really on the very low end of that scale, stuff like sealant or a tiny amount of filling like a glass ionomer as a prevention for a cavity that was only a few mins worth of work or applying some fissure sealant.
Germany, due to politicians gutting it more and more and it needing reforms its going down hill systemicly.
But its better than having none!
Poland
My country may be poor backwards post-soviet hole, but social media and news present USA as Fallout-style post-apocalyptic dystopia.
Every member of my family has a family doctor assigned (it’s the same one for convenience). This doctor reminds us about mandatory vaccinations and tips us if there are any diseases spreading (for preparation sake). If anyone is seek we can usually schedule visit within a week, and most standard medicines are fairly cheap due to governmental control.
Canada - All of that would be covered, prescriptions aren’t.
Seemingly more and more people want the American system.
Simply wrong.
It’s very difficult to understand what something actually is like until you’ve experienced it yourself. To anyone Canadians who want the insurance-driven racket they have down south, I’d would suggest you move there.
That’s restarted. None of that is covered and we still have to pay for prescriptions. Who would WANT that?
It’s the near-culmination of a decades-long project to privatize healthcare. Governments defund and mismanage the public system to manufacture consent for privatization.
I suspect they’re sold on the idea that the public system costs them lots of money through taxes to cover people who abuse the system. Clearly, the solution is the American system where you save all that money on taxes, spend 3x as much on employer-sourced insurance tied to your employment while for-profit Healthcare services abuse the system.
China
I broke my foot during the previous spring festival. They called the surgeon back from his holiday, opened a operating room especially for my surgery, got a private room and my wife could stay in the room with me on a extra bed, 6 days in hospital. Total cost around €120 including x-rays, medication etc. The only thing I had to pay for extra was lunch at 2€.
General checkup is 50 RMB which is 7 US$.
More price comparison info: https://www.lostincn.com/medical-tourism-cost-china-price-guide-2026/
Italy here.
It’s great to have it, and as I see what happens around the world I understand how nearly utopian-like the concept is.
… but people will complain and moan about it anyway, and the main reason is that:
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while being universal every different region (20 in italy) has its own locally administered and budgeted subsystem implementation which
mightwill differ from the next region system and so patients data won’t be able to be transferable or even observable from each different region network
Also the level of cures you receive might vary in their quality from region to region -
it is understaffed because the salary is not worth the responsibilities, unless you get to be a specialist doctor, so for instance there are not nearly enough nurses or sometimes triage doctors, and so many workers have to go through extenuating working hours scheduling to cover for that, and of course this will affect their performance and even sending some into burnout
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it is understaffed because it is under budgeted and this is by design bay politics, ultimately run by right-wingers since some decades already, who are trying to give the people more and more reason to hate the public health system, so one day they might be able to succeed to sell all the public (paid with peoples taxes) infrastructures to privates, transforming the public health system into the “american dream” health system
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it is under budgeted because taxes here are paid for the 70% of the total by employees and by retired people, which constitutes but a glimpse of the personal profits of the total, while every one with an autonomous job, including companies, just fuck with taxes, year after year, in a systematic and systemic way, so much that every new government will indict a new taxation amnesty because the budget needed to go after the unpaid taxation is more than the taxation not earned.
…o yeah and after that the same politician will complain and moan about the public health system being inefficient and needing a privatization reform.
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