Britain had age limits on dialysis. So for them, dialysis was cheaper. Come some birthday, it was happy birthday and no more dialysis. Syonara, baby.

Especially when it comes to kidney transplants the main hospital (Rikshospitalet) in Oslo is among the world leading. It is one of the ten biggest centres for kidney transplants in the world, it has one of the highest rates for success and it has one of the shortest wait lists.
One of the reasons for the short waiting lists is the use of living kidney donors. I know that in other countries the use of living donors is not that common because it is seen as too risky. In Norway there haven’t been any incidents where the person donating a kidney has endured any life threatening or life changing injury.
And this is a governmental hospital, the treatment ends up with costing the government more than 5 figures as the patients live on medication the rest of their lifes.

Yes it does, much the same as Sweden I suppose. But of course it’s difficult to maintain a private clinic in the rural areas of Norway. They are for the most situated in the bigger cities.

Health is too important to settle for government incompetence for everyone. If people loved the Walter Reed Army hospital scandal, they will love Obama Care.

This does not bash government workers. Once they leave, they are superb workers, usually deserving many times their government salaries. The problem is not with the workers. It is with the influence of politics.

Also, the government is the biggest entity in the US. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the criminal cult enterprise that is the lawyer profession. The lawyers make 99% of the government decisions, and seek to plunder clinical care. It can destroy even innocent doctors by generating legal defense costs. One has to then attack the lawyer personally, filing complaints, countersuits, seeking legal fees, injunctions, and demanding discovery of the land pirates personal computer. The government cannot get even a frivolous countersuit dismissed for less than $1mil. Generate massive government defense costs to take out the budget of the oppressor.

One should always find child porn, a federal offense, on the land pirate’s government computer, if one looks hard enough. Let the government land pirate defend that. No doctor should live with uncertainty without tons of government lawyers living with the same torment. Always attack back, if one is innocent.

However bad and frustrating insurance is to doctors, the risk of a government monopoly, a dictatorship with police powers over the $2 tril health budget is pure evil and lethal to anyone with a serious illness or injury.

I suppose there are advantages and disadvantages. The odds are good. We are too expensive, and Euro care is too stingy.

The wages of the doctors are low, but they likely work less. The average doc here works 2500 hours a year. Still they are reasonable. I would not want my doctor to be angry about his not making the $90K he demanded from the British government. I want him content and motivated to do all he can for me. I do not want him going home at 5 PM, on the dot. So, I have to wait for his return the next day, or the next week, to remove the ice pick from my head.

We get our impression of Europe from the British system.

Some docs I know, Swedish nationals, corrected me about their country. I naively assumed there was no private health insurance in Sweden. They both said their families back home have private insurance to cover healthcare either not offered, or may offer unacceptable (to them) waiting lists.

How about Norway?

I’ll start here though: “Costs are double over there. Salaries are half of ours for everyone, down to the maids in hotels.”

That is just not correct, at least not for Norway I believe. I don’t know what the average wage is for hotel maids in the US, but I found one reference after a quick googling suggesting that it’s about 10 dollar pr.hour? If that is correct it’s actually the other way around: Our hotel maids make twice as much as yours do?

You will probably find that jobs that requires little or no education will be better paid in Norway than in the US. On the other hand, education will get you a higher wage in US than in Norway.

So a hotel maid will make around 40 000 dollar a year in Norway as of now with the dollar being rather weak, while my wife who is a physiotherapist makes around 55 000. A doctor working at a hospital or similar will make about 100 000 dollar a year, while a doctor with a private practice will make at least twice that, some of them making as much as 400 000 dollars a year.

Now this is getting to be a long comment, so I finish it up now by saying that yes, we do have and use helicopters. We do transplants, and specially our heart surgeons are at a high international level. Being a small country we probably have less specialists in fewer fields than the US, but our health care is not cheap. Patients do get expensive care over here as well.

Now I’m not saying that our system is better than yours, (even though I tend to think so, being a norwegian) I just think that many americans have a wrong view of “socialized medicin”

Does anyone in Norway get expensive care, for example, costing 5 figures?

I would like to know about what goes on, in terms of real world medicine. Does any country use helicopters? Do they have specialized trauma centers? Do they believe there is a golden hour? What are their survival rates for car accidents, compared to ours? Similar questions may be asked in other specialties.

Costs are double over there. Salaries are half of ours for everyone, down to the maids in hotels. How do people live like that, and put up with their oppressive governments?

Our Supreme Court Justices summer in Europe. Our academic elites do the same. Each year, they return with idiotic Euro ideas, and seek to impose central government rule on our free people. Such guests would serve a great purpose in giving us warning about our futures.

Of course not. We give them two aspirins, tell them to call us in the morning, and if they don’t they are dead. Wich is good because it saves money!

But everybody gets aspirin!