Healthcare: Germany vs. America
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91971170
My brother has a very close relationship with a friend in Germany due to the Foreign exchange program and I have learned a lot about the differences between our two health care systems. Many problems I hear on the news about moving to a supposedly “socialized” health care system is that it will create long lines. I took this to the test and asked Kathi, our German exchange student who lives in Kiel, a city off the baltic sea. To get into a hospital she waited an hour (which she thought was a long time). I was quite surprised because I had just taken my friend to a hospital here in Richmond and had to wait 6 hours. I also asked her about costs and according to this NPR article Germans pay 8% percent of their income to have health care for all. The positive externalities for having healthy people outweighs that minuscule costs.
After asking more and more questions I started to realize that everything I had been told by the wonderful Conservative radio stations and news channels were completely false. All they have to do is repeat something enough and people seem to believe it. We hear how bad Canada’s system is and how bad England’s system seems to be, yet I have never lived in either of these countries and I assume that many of the people against health care here have never experienced these systems first hand.
Germany seems to have the system right and they have had health care since the beginning of universal health care. How can Germany have a universal health care system since Otto Von Bismark and America continue to put their trust in private insurance companies that have no actual care in the people they insure?
It seizes to amaze me how the media works in influencing the masses.
