$8k to Give Birth

> People should never have to worry whether they can financially manage to go and see a doctor when they are in need of one. Doesn't care if you've broken your arm, am expecting a child or if you're chronically ill.

I live in Sweden. Sweden has socialised health care so in theory it should be possible to go and see a doctor when [I am] in need of one. That's right, in theory. In practice the waiting times can be so astronomical that many people - my partner included - are on private health care insurances to make sure they actually go and see a doctor when they need one instead of in 4 months time, if you're lucky. This does mean they pay twice for health care, once through provincial ('landsting') taxes, once through the private health care insurance. It is the latter which ends up paying the bill, the question is where the former money goes. When she needed to see a doctor a few months ago she first tried to go the normal route through the public health care system. The response was 'we can book you for this-and-that date in 6 months time'. Right. When she called the private insurance it only took a few days. These waiting times accumulate, e.g. the doctor wants the patient to get a CT scan - wait for 2 months. MRI, wait 3 months, etc. The private insurance has bought (time on the) machines so they can offer a time next week.

For acute problems the public health care system is still the go-to place even if waiting times in emergency rooms are now so long that some hospitals (e.g. Sunderby, between Luleå and Boden in Norrbotten) have called upon visitors to 'make sure to take food and any needed medications with them as the waiting time can exceed 24 hours'.

So where to go from here? Public health care is affordable but often not available. Private health care is available but often not affordable. How can these two goals - affordability and availability - be met in one system?

_Fascism_: political ideology and mass movement. The name comes from the Latin word fasces, a bundle of elm or birch rods (usually containing an axe) used as a symbol of penal authority in ancient Rome. Although fascist parties and movements differed significantly from one another, they had many characteristics in common, including extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and the rule of elites, and the desire to create a Volksgemeinschaft (German: “people’s community”), in which individual interests would be subordinated to the good of the nation.

If anything fascist states want their citizens to get more children, not fewer. More children means more workers, more soldiers, more future mothers for yet even more children, all to propel the State (with a capital 'S') to greater heights.

Maybe people forget the elaborate system of lies in which commercial payors tell providers “I’ll pay .6 on the dollar” so providers say “ok I’ll ‘charge’ you (cost + margin) * 3” because I’ve gotta make a healthy margin this one to cross subsidize the patient with a government payor who will only pay .3 on the dollar.

It's as much of a strawman argument as the Twitter image is, then, since the image is literally a picture of a hospital bill.

One argument doesn't mention the subtext of socialized medicine, and the other doesn't mention the subtext of insurance.

> You think giving birth is free? There are usually 3 or 4 professionals present [...]

Of course it's not free. It's about who takes care of the costs. You should not see a bill from the hospital as your health care provider should fully take care of this.

Story time: When I was a little kid, I stumbled with a glass jar in my hand, fell into the shards and cut my right hand open. Half a centimeter more and I'd have lost three fingers of my right hand completly. Tendons and nerves were cut and the fingers were immobilized immediately.

Never did anyone worry about what it might cost to fix this. Not my family, not the hospital, possibly not even the health care insurance provider.

Instead I was taken to the best hospital for this kind of damage and several high trained professionals operated for 8 hours to fix it. After my hospital time I got movement therapy to get my hand fully working again.

This is a real indicator for a developed, first-world state: Whatever happens to you, professionals will take of you and you won't have to worry whether your family will go bankrupt because you stumbled as a kid or not. Because the society as a whole has build a net that will catch you when things like this happen.