My cousin didn’t actually go to France for health care but he’s stayed there for it. He went to play jazz music and while there was diagnosed with a severe degenerative heart problem. He could never get insurance in the U.S. because this condition is expensive to treat and will certainly kill him early. And couldn’t afford to pay for treatment here. In Paris he’s seen to by one of the top specialists in the world. Free (of course he pays taxes).
People come to the U.S. because we do indeed have some VERY good health care and because if you have the cash, you can get treated.
Maybe he should consider relocating when the inevitable becomes imminent (from transplant.com):
“Abstract:
Background. Allocation of organs is organized on a regional basis in France. We assessed regional differences in access to organ transplant.
Material and Methods. We used the recipient database and the waiting list database from the year 1994 onward. We estimated median waiting time by region and organ. The probability of receiving a transplant was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method. Between-region comparisons used the log-rank test, with adjustment for blood type and disease category.
Results. At the end of a 4-month follow-up period, 49% of 3,553 patients had received transplants: 64% of 797 benefited from liver transplants, 52% of 549 from heart transplants, and 22% of 2,207 from kidney transplants. Death rates on the waiting lists were 10%, 14%, and 1% for patients selected for liver, heart, and kidney transplant, respectively. Transplantation percentage (all organs) decreased from 63% in the West to 43% in the Paris region and mortality increased from 2% in the West to 7% in the Southeast. All tests of inter-regional differences were statistically significant.
Conclusion. Factors explaining geographic differences related to the background of transplant teams, activity of organ procurement, and severity of patients on the list.
(C) 2003 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Inc.”
Your cousin is very lucky the french health care is dying fast.You can’t make a real evaluation of the french health care with the case of your cousin.
As many french doctors i am leaving and looking to work abroad...
All the analysis of the french health care are warning for a huge doctors deficit coming in the next years concerning all the fields of medicine.Beside this there is a huge economic deficit which weighs heavily and weakens french economy
Exactly.
Take my wife’s Dutch cousin, an ex-secretary married to a trucker in Holland. In her mid 50s she came down with a heart condition that eventually prevented her from working. Does she have better access to affordable care than her typical US counterpart? Absolutely.
But if was 80, would she have received the sort of expensive government-funded cardiac surgery my wife’s mother did - paid for by Medicare - at that age? Absolutely not.
Every country has to make choices about how to ration publicly funded health care, and every country rations it differently. In this country middle-aged people regularly go bankrupt as a result of medical expenses - never happens in Holland. In this country people with an actuarial expectation of only a few more years of life receive hundred of thousands of dollars worth of life-extending treatments, never happens in Holland.
One important difference between the US and most other advance economies is that they have a much more candid public discussion about how they ration these resources than we do. IMO that’s because many people on both the left ans right in this country are locked into ideological positions that prevent them from acknowledging that rationing does, and has, to take place at all.