PolyPassport recently profiled a Texan woman and her family’s journey from the US to France in search of more affordable healthcare and saner politics. They had EU passports on the basis of ancestry.
It reinforces a lot of the stereotypes we have about healthcare in Europe, particularly on pricing and access overall. Cataract surgery cost her some 300 EUR (!) and her daughter receives free prosthetics every two years.
But her story does dispel the notion that anyone, anywhere can just walk into an EU hospital and get treated—including EU citizens. That’s consistent with my own experience. I’ve lived in a few EU countries and certainly paid less for often high-quality care than in the US. But I never found it to be straightforward or necessarily leagues better than equivalent systems, say, in Asia. Like the woman in the article, I also missed speaking to providers in my native language about ailments that can’t often be conveyed with an A2 level proficiency! :)
It got me thinking about the trade-offs we face when chasing healthcare (or anything really) abroad. It’s about balancing the good with the not-so-good and making the most of our choices wherever we go.
Food for thought and a point discussion.
I found healthcare in Malaysia to be really accessible and affordable. However, being on private insurance there was nerve wracking. Doctors would overprescribe medications and offer up outrageous operations for minor ailments.
Additionally, it was difficult to anticipate how different some procedures were to what I was used to. I agreed to a mole removal, which I’ve had a lot of in the US and is usually done with a tool that quickly punches out the tissue. It’s fast, minimal scarring and no stitches. In Malaysia the doctor carved the mole out with a scalpel. I ended up with a lot more scarring, antibiotics and recovery.
There were some good doctors, but I didn’t have a lot of trust in the medical system there since it felt like the doctors were working on commission for what they could push on you.
I had very cheap compulsory medical insurance several years ago when I was living in Malaysia. I was hospitalised for a few days at most. It was a private hospital with nurses outnumbering patients, excellent food, very skilled workers and the policy must have cost me less than 1,000 RMB a year