Licho wrote:Cheesecan wrote:
Lol dude I paid 20Ôé¼ last time I went to the doctor for 2 mins to get a prescription. Health care is costly in this country if you don't have insurance to cover it or are so sick that you reach up to a certain amount(Ôé¼90 per year iirc) where the government would start paying your medical bills.
How can you not have insurance? I thought its possible just in USA. Do you have to arrange it or something?
Here all people have insurance, you pay % rate from your income - it's like an extra tax. If you don't have enough income or are student/<26 years, you simply don't pay any even if you have income.
And you can pick one of insurance companies, they don't run any checks on you or anything you just call them and tell them you want to use them.
They work the same, they only differ in what extras they offer, some have free gym, some give you contraceptions for free or extra vaccinations for free - like cervical cancer or tick illnesses.
Here they've basically found a way here to charge everyone so many taxes, both regular and hidden ones, that by the end of the month, a white-collar worker doesn't earn much more than a blue-collar worker(this is due to the old Swedish fight against social classes).
Over here, insurances are usually provided by the employer or by your union. Unions cost a lot of money to be part of though. Here the biggest unions are like a maffia who are directly involved in political matters. They charge some pretty ridiculous membership fees, like Ôé¼400 per year just for membership, then you also pay for their insurances on top of that. And if you are a high earner, the membership cost would scale so you would pay more than regular members.
Gym card and such things are usually benefits given by the employer, but it varies a lot from employer to employer. Some do not give any benefits. And some government companies such as the postal service have over 600 benefits including IVF(in vitro fertilisation) lol.
We have a state income insurance when we get sick, which gives you back a percentage of your income. Of course you have to apply to get it, and the government could deny you. Lots of people used to live on this sick insurance in the past years because the government accepted all applications, but these days, they deny more and more people who actually need it.
The government also gives subsidized health care if you reach a certain amount, about 90Ôé¼, when costs would be reduced to 50%, then scaling down and reaching 0% if you reach over 180Ôé¼. This is not really a huge amount of money for most Swedes, except if you are say an unemployed student, in which case you might have an insurance instead.
Note that the government health care cost limit doesn't cover dental fees. Dental care is only free here for children. The government will subsidize it up to 50% for most non-aesthetic operations that cost over a certain amount. But costs after subsidy could still be in the region of several thousands of euros, so usually you would have a dental insurance to cover the rest. For instance I pay Ôé¼4/month for state dental insurance, depending on your age and teeth the cost could vary a lot, some people pay ~Ôé¼100/month. Some people also have private dental insurance which covers more kinds of dental care, and might also provide private clinics.
We also have 25% VAT on almost everything, and an incremental tax system, which demoralizes working people. Why? For instance if you are earning Ôé¼30k/month already, and get a salary raise of Ôé¼50 one year, the real raise after tax would be ~Ôé¼25, so that's 50% tax on your raise.
Despite all of this, we also have higher base tax than the rest of the world. For instance we have higher tax than the UK, where all health care is free through the NHS.
So Sweden is basically a strange kind of socialist-capitalist hybrid experiment. All our public sector companies are being sold off by the current government. We used to have government-run pharmacies. But these have now been sold out to pharmaceutical companies. Whenever they launch a new pill, they would remove from stock the pill that people previously used. Of course the new one is more expensive and untested etc. We have almost no testing of pharmaceuticals by the government, because pharmaceutical companies can lobby very hard here, buying politicians dinners, trips and such things. In that way Sweden is also very corrupt. For instance last year, Sweden bought 20 million doses of flu vaccines. Of course Sweden only has a population of 9 million, and not everyone wanted to get vaccinated. So the government then sold the remaining doses at flee market prices(no pun intended) and wasted tax payer money. They also just discovered that the vaccine gave lots of children sleeping sickness. Of course the Swedish government was nice enough to oblige to all conditions, so they will be paying for the costs. The multinationals walk away having earned a forkload of money from little stupid Sweden.
Yeah, I think my country sucks balls.
Forb, you are such a slut.
