Kmarion wrote:
Thanks for
the link Varegg. The follwing video was very telling. You've got to move countries in order to get the equivalent of American treatment (She had to come to America prior to this just to figure out what needed to be done). The doctors in France and Spain agreed that she needed the treatment .. but the government of France decided that they didn't want to pay for it.
[google]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5065868066847910612&hl=en[/google]
The system is not finished yet, only on a trial basis ... and of course it has flaws as it is now, the hope of centralizing this inside the EU is for example to develop the same expertise in specialist hospitals like you have in the states and this can only be done when you have certain amounts of patients within the same system having the same diagnose ...
Not sure about EU but we have in Norway coop agreements with several US & British hospitals for certain procedures that doesn't exist in Norway, it's idiotic to fly a patient to the US when you could do the same procedure inside EU eventually ... hopefully ...
One of the reasons for this common health plan for EU and EFTA is that they have recognized that specialists in the US are much better at what they do than their equals in Europe because the doctors in the US have a much larger patient group ...
So when they finally will sort of the economic aspects of the EU health plan with money returns and such I believe it will have the same standard and coverage as the US system but it will be socialized also ... a major health reform, and if we can do projects on such a grand scale so can you
Wait behind the line ..............................................................