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Friday Fun Thread for May 12, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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This will probably get buried but it's outrageous that you can be bankrupted by medical debt if you get sick in the US! In Europe this doesn't happen.

EDIT: thanks for the gold kind stranger


I'm really exhausted by what seems to be this interminable stuck-at-superficial-memes discussion about health care in the US. I've lived in the US, spent a few years in the UK and experienced NHS, found it surprisingly shitty even though I was looking forward to rubbing Americans' faces in it, and then I ended up back in the US and actually on Medicaid (by near accident! a story for another time though) and found the quality significantly higher.

My new EA cause area for improving health care in the US is to arrange to have everyone live in Europe for a few years so they can get past using it as a cudgel for trying to advocate for their ideology that will fix everything.

I suspect it would backfire horribly and important lessons wouldn't be learned because the irony is too thick, but I dunno I'd really enjoy hearing "whaaaat? I need to wait 3 weeks for a blood draw because the one phlebotomist for my area is on vacation?"

To be clear I'm not saying the UK health care system is an order of magnitude worse (or better) than the US one, just that there are tradeoffs that can be hard to appreciate until you experience them.

The medical system in the UK is unusually bad. I found the medical system in Germany, Austria and Italy each far superior to it (and at least the last one of the three has no case for better socioeconomics). The US one was also superior, but (at least in the incarnation that you get as a PhD student at a reasonably rich university) still inferior to the three continental European countries above. My one encounter with the Canadian medical system put it only slightly below the Europeans. It's not clear to me if it's something cultural, or a consequence of the specific implementation and incentives it produces (I have low-confidence information that Sweden, which has the most similar medical system to the UK out of the ones I sampled so far, is similarly bad), but nowhere else have I encountered the combination of doctors who were this aggressively unwilling or unable to bring their brains to the job and just stubbornly prescribe heavy-duty medication which at best did nothing and at worst had nasty side effects based on an autocomplete-tier diagnosis (or actually googling the symptoms right in front of me) and complete lack of any equipment to even do something like basic blood tests (you get a referral to a lab and have to get another appointment once the results are in before they look at them, and the hope is clearly that in the >=7 days it takes the problem will resolve itself one way or another).

I found the medical system in Germany, Austria and Italy each far superior to it (and at least the last one

I hear this all of the time but I can't reconcile this with my experience.

I took my sister to the doctor in Italy once, in the countryside, and the doctor was an obese stupid looking guy in a big dimly lit room with no computer or desk. He looked at my sister's really strange bite on her leg and seemed oblivious to the possibility that this insect bite could cause Lyme disease. Even though she told him (in fluent Italian) that she was concerned this was a tick bite and that she could get Lyme disease. He just gave her some of of cortisone injection and sent her on her way.

She got Lyme disease.

On the plus side it was free.

I dunno I'm sure there are some doctors like this everywhere but if there was a doctor in the US that was this incompetent and they charged $200 I feel like the community would deal with them.

It's so unbelievable I'm doubting whether this actually happened even though I was definitely there and sober.

(Your UK assessment seems very familiar)

I don't know if this is accurate for Italy or not but this is something I've noticed in Sweden.

Primary care is becoming a low status speciality due to a combination of increased workload and an influx of poorly educated and wetted non-eu doctors working in that sector (non-eu doctors that are not in primary care seem decent enough). This means that going to the doctor has become a complete gamble and unless you know that your gp is competent you can expect to have to do their job for them.

However, If you for some reason end up in a hospital you'll receive excellent care by competent doctors.

The end result is that if you unwittingly go for a one-off primary care visit in Sweden and you uncritically accept what the doctor says then you're more likely than not to receive very poor care for non-emergency issues (where they can refer you to a hospital).