• Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.club
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      5 days ago

      I’m Brazilian. Brazil have a free healthcare system called “Sistema Único de Saúde” (“Unified Health System”) or, as we often call it by its acronym, “SUS”.

      While I personally had a fair good experience with it when I needed medical care, SUS is not perfect. There are notorious disparities between Brazilian states regarding to how many public health financing from taxes each city any state gets. For example: the state of São Paulo has better public healthcare than, say, Minas Gerais (and I’m talking about two states that I personally know and resided in, so I’m not talking about something I read somewhere or something I heard from someone). Even when they’re neighbors. It’s not because Minas Gerais is worse than São Paulo, because it isn’t, it’s because São Paulo gets to get more tax funding.

      The following is recent news (as from this week) from a major Brazilian news television program, translated to English:

      That man is hospitalized through the Brazilian public healthcare system. Cases like his happen on a daily basis throughout the Brazilian territory, especially in the northern states, but not limited to. It’s just that his case got to get the attention of the media. Several Maurílios (and Marílias) face similar bureaucratic slippery slopes every day.

      Is the private healthcare better, then? Hell no, of course not! Our “convênios médicos” are as bureaucratic as the US healthcare insurance, perhaps even worse. The only thing that’s far from bureaucratic is “particular healthcare” because the patient pay directly to the doctor, but it’s generally expensive and far from the reaches of the reality of millions of Brazilians, and they don’t really cover all the medical needs (e.g.: paying directly to a doctor won’t cover the need of MRI scanning, because individual doctors often have no MRI machines for their own medical service).

      The “Sistema Único de Saúde” is something to be improved and it’s far from perfect and it needs lots of fixes, but it’s undeniably a public healthcare system model to inspire Americans so they can begin with a proper healthcare system nationwide. I don’t really know British NHS or Canadian public healthcare systems, but Brazilian system is probably unique because of how many people it serves (216 million people, more than UK and Canada populations summed up).

    • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 days ago

      Oh the Tories want US style healthcare so bad, the way they’re cutting into NHS.

      I can’t speak for Australia, but from the corruption bullshit I hear coming from their whatever socialized medicine they have right now is at risk of dissolving.

      Hopefully, the EU knows better than to go the same route.

      • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        I can’t speak for Australia, but from the corruption bullshit I hear coming from their whatever socialized medicine they have right now is at risk of dissolving.

        Hopefully, the EU knows better than to go the same route.

        I’ve been on the NHS, and the EU would do well to emulate THE INTENDED FORM of the NHS.

        You can’t shit on the NHS because it’s become infiltrated with corrupt arseholes or been underfunded recently.

        In Godel, Escher and Bach one of the ideas is that you cannot have a system that is completly useful and 100% airtight. Any useful enough system can be corrupted to destroy itself. The NHS needs to be better funded and cut out the stupid amount of middlemen it has adopted, 100%, but the blueprint should be emulated by many other places.

    • inv3r510n@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      That’s just because your health care is excluded from capitalism. The evils of capitalism still apply to everything else.

    • BreadOven@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I’m not from the US. I’m happy with my country’s healthcare. I’m not trying to drag anywhere else into it.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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      6 days ago

      Not for lack of trying, the corruption of the US spreads wherever it can. When a large tree is dying, it rots from the centre of the trunk first. The rot at the core of capitalism started where the most power resides, and that’s why the US is such a horror show. You aren’t immune from it, it just hasn’t rotted as badly where you are.