Do Finland’s and Britain’s Healthcare System Work
Stanley Feld M.D.FACP,MACE
The Finn’s have been frustrated with their highly praised and publicized socialistic healthcare system. Finland’s free healthcare system has received excellent press in Britain. Now citizens in the U.S. are being brainwashed about the success of this system by Bernie Sanders.
Why? Britain’s socialized medicine system is collapsing. The system lost 200,000 nurses since 2010.
In 2017/18, more than 26,000 nurses left the health service. Voluntary resignations from the NHS is up 55 per cent.
The number of NHS staff quitting over long hours has tripled in six years. Voluntary resignations citing chronic staff shortages resulting in long hours and poor work-life balance were the largest reason for such nurses quitting the NHS. Primary care physicians are quitting for the same reasons and low reimbursement.
Royal College of Nursing (RCN) acting chief executive, Dame Donna Kinnair, said: “Health and care services are losing thousands of experienced, dedicated nursing staff who feel as if no-one is sufficiently listening to their concerns and patient care is routinely compromised by chronic staff shortages.
The National Health Service is about to lose more nurses and physicians because the National Health Service is about to have to reduce nurses’ pay once again while increasing weekly work hours.
“Finland’s health service has been in a parlous state for decades and it is getting worse.”
Bernie Sanders should not be telling us how great “Medicare for All” will be.
Last year former Social Security and Medicare Trustee Charles Blahous exposed the $32.6 trillion price tag.
“As massive as BernieCare’s estimated $32.6 trillion ten-year price tag is, it would be even more massive if it didn’t assume that U.S. doctors and nurses will simply accept the low pay and poor working conditions that Mr. Sanders has in mind.”
“The 32.6 trillion assumes doctors and nurses in the United States continue to willingly practice medicine if the job comes with lower pay and even more bureaucracy than the current highly regulated system?”
it will create a deficit of more than three trillion dollars a year and not save the 600 billion dollars over ten years promised. Bernie Sanders should know Britain’s and Finland’s free healthcare systems have failed. He should stop lying to the American public.
Back to Finland and the big Bernie lie.
Seventeen percent (17%) of Finnish doctors work solely in the private sector. Most of these physicians are general practitioners. This is twice the percentage of physicians that were in the private sector twenty years ago.
An additional twenty percent of physicians work in the private sector as well and the public sector.
The bizarre thing is most employers in Finland pay for their workers to have private primary healthcare. Employers do not pay for their employees’ families. The families remain in the public sector.
The public sector is far from free. A family practitioner visit cost 16.10 euros. However, patients only pay for the first three visits and then it is free.
According to Dr. Saarinen of Ula “the more experienced and “better” doctors end up in the private sector, leaving the “inexperienced” and “inefficient” doctors running the health centers.”
Private practitioners are better paid and work under less pressure than public practitioners.
“A hospital consultation in the public sector costs about €38, and you pay for each night that you spend in the hospital, up to a maximum of €679.”
The free healthcare service in Finland is not national. Municipalities pay for the free service. The result is service in poorer areas of the country tend to have bad health service and limited access to medical care.
Private GPs usually set up practices in more affluent areas where they are more likely to get paid.
It looks like a grim socialized medicine system. No wonder Finns deny the finding they are the happiest people in the world.
“In Helsinki there are reports of huge queues at health centres (GP surgeries), waits for appointments of many weeks, and greater and greater demands with less and less funding. In south-eastern Finland, it takes about a month to see a GP. Back in December 2013, it was reported that Finns were increasingly using private doctors in neighboring Estonia to save time and money.”
Dr. Saarinen explains that the system essentially forces people to go private or rely on friends who are doctors.
Finland’s healthcare system has been a mess for at least two decades.
The big question is why in the U.S. do we permit politicians such as Bernie Sanders, OA Cortez, and a complicit mass media get away with the lies about the glory of socialized medicine?
How do we permit our media and our politicians get away with this disinformation?
The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone.
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