With all this debate over healthcare I thought I’d tell a story of a recent friend of mine (American) who came to visit me and what her experience was. It’s not just to brag at how good we have it here (although we do) but to kind of show all of you what it COULD be like.
Honestly I’m very blessed to have excellent health so I haven’t had a whole lot of PERSONAL experience with healthcare in Romania. But when my friend came to visit me this summer, her lifelong asthma flared up and her breathing got so restricted that she was having trouble sleeping. Clearly, she needed some medical help.
So what to do? It was Friday afternoon after 5pm. Where in the world could we find a doctor, much less one who knew a little something about breathing problems? This was a little more complex than a sprained ankle. So the first thing I did was go to the free touch-screen government info kiosks that are all over the place (essentially a big telephone booth with a computer).
It told us where to go (in 4 languages – Europe LOL) and we walked over and found the right building and the right door therein. We opened the right door and there was ONE person ahead of us so we waited outside for no more than 10 minutes. The doctor (a respiratory specialist) then saw my friend (AND he spoke English), wrote out some prescriptions and the whole thing lasted 10 minutes tops.
Cost for the visit? Free (and remember, she’s not even a EU citizen much less a Romanian one). Paperwork for us to fill out? None. The cost of filling TWO prescription was about $8 US at a pharmacy (a for-profit ordinary business btw, not some gov’t druggist). Total time from start to finish? Less than an hour. On a FRIDAY AFTERNOON AFTER 5pm.
Ok that’s a story you could repeat over and over in countries like France and Canada, etc. You already KNOW this part. Or at least I hope you do as my friend sure didn’t. She wanted to swing by the house to pick up her credit cards first! Oof. That’s both hilarious and painful at the same time.
But I imagine that if you asked someone to IMAGINE what good gov’t healthcare is like, that would be about what they’d guess (if they dared to dream that high). But there’s a lot more.
A Romanian friend of mine gave birth at the end of last year and I went to go officially welcome him into this crazy old world. It was an entirely for-profit clinic for women and extremely luxurious, modern and nice. There was this awesome machine wherein the visitor steps into it and it wraps your footware in a bootie – sort of “shrink wraps” your shoes LOL which hilariously the lady explained to me how to use in Romanian when the digital display was in English (machine is made in the USA).
It was as nice of a place as you could imagine a healthcare place to be. The patient gets a menu to choose her meals from and the bathroom was gorgeous, spacious and spotless.
What’s my point here? My point is that for-profit healthcare is doing just freaking fine alongside gov’t healthcare. My friend could’ve given birth for free (and of course still receives ONE YEAR of paid vacation LOL) in a public facility. People do it every day all the time. But if you WANT to, if you’ve got the money and want an upgrade on healthcare, you CAN.
And here’s the third feature of Romanian (public) healthcare that’s so nice. The government is PROACTIVE. Right now they have a little tent in downtown where they are offering to measure your blood pressure (for free of course LOL). But once you’re in there, they have COUNSELORS and books they’re selling and people to TALK to about your medical problems or issues or concerns.
So what do you get here? People get a health indicator measurement (blood pressure) and can speak to someone who knows what those numbers MEAN and can give useful healthcare advice on the spot.
Secondly, it gives people to speak to the counselors about OTHER healthcare issues as well. They might get a referral of where to go. Or they might just get some useful information the spot. When you see that tent it kind of goes HEY, do you have a medical issue? Kind of wakes up your brain.
And what else? It comes to YOU. People are busy here too. It takes about 1 million more times effort to schedule a medical appointment than it does to just RUN INTO one and stop by and chat for five minutes. I mean if I was running USA healthcare, I’d make nursewagons – rolling vans of nurses to go to job sites so people can do the same thing on their lunch breaks.
And of course the gov’t also REWARDS YOU for being proactive. A buddy of mine wanted to quit smoking so he went to the gov’t and of course bam, they have this entire course of treatment for him. And it worked. But even if it didn’t, he could come back and repeat the entire thing AS OFTEN AS HE NEEDED/WANTED TO. Period.
There are no saints running things here. In fact, corruption is incredibly blatant here (it appeals to someone like me, but it isn’t for everybody LOL) and there’s tons of infighting and the whole nine yards. That’s why it’s so tragically sad that the USA can’t get healthcare together! I mean come on, Romania is kicking your ass!
And that’s exactly how my friend felt and how I’m hoping YOU will feel. At first she was like wow, this gov’t healthcare situation is great. And then when she realized it was KICKING AMERICA’S ASS she started to get outraged.
Are you? You should be.
Pax
