It has already snowed three times in the past week, with one round sticking enough to make snowmen and have snowball fights. Which made me realize that I had better get over to my neighborhood undertaker and get a picture of fall before it is too late.
Driving a cheap bicycle is a little like owning a $500 car. Something is always not working quite right. To date, I’ve had to replace the cables for my light, the handlebars, the shifting mechanism and the bike chain. But unlike a car, it’s hard to get nickel and dimed to death. I think my total investment into the bike is running me about 90 euros. My latest investment was a 17 euro light, the kind that is powered not by batteries, but by pedaling.
But since I park my bike outside in the rain, I’m waiting for the day when it rusts apart completely. Not that the same can’t happen to a car. I remember our family’s first second car was this early 1980s Toyota Corolla which had been spray painted silver to cover up the rust spots (very classy). If you lifted up the passenger-side floor mat, you could literally see the road beneath your feet. It finally met its death when a certain unnamed driver got into a fender bender. The crash busted out a light on the other driver’s car, but left our Corolla with a broken axis due to the rust factor. Oops!
I produced my first radio piece today. Unless they decide it’s crap, it will run over the weekend (when not many people are listening). Can you believe it? Slow talking me on the radio? Of course, they had to give me the radio version of a face lift: a speed up. Yep, I’m 5 percent faster on the radio than in real life. Hilarious.
Several different people have asked me how Germany’s health care system works. First of all, let me clear up one misconception: this is not Swedish-style socialized medicine. Everyone is covered, but there’s no rationing of services and doctors are not government employees. Here’s my best attempt at a summary:
Nine out of 10 Germans are covered under the public health care system. Each person can choose between “sickness funds”, which have no equivalent in the United States. Each sickness fund has to provide a standard level of care for a set price (currently set at 15.5 percent of your salary, which is split 50-50 between employer and employee, which means you pay about 7.5 percent, unless you’re self employed in which case you pay the whole thing). This fee also covers any dependents and spouses who aren’t working. The sickness funds compete for patients, but are non-profit. When you are retired or unemployed or whatever, the government picks up the entire tab.
There are co-pays involved in this system. Once a quarter, you have to pay 10 euros (about $12.50) for visiting the doctor. You also pay up to 10 euros for each night in the hospital and up to 10 euros for prescription medication. But the total paid in co-pays can never equal more than 1 percent of your salary. So if you make 40,000 euros, you might have to pay 400 euros in a year if you get really sick.
The sickness funds negotiate with doctors and pharmaceutical companies and set prices for how much everything costs. This helps keep costs low, but means that doctors don’t necessarily make a lot of money. All procedures (except what is considered “lifestyle medicine” such as a boob job or viagra) are covered. You can go to any doctor you want.
There are some waits, but relatively few. If you call the doctor with the flu, they will usually get you in within hours, if not the next day. If you injure your knee and need surgery, you might have to wait for a couple of weeks, but I don’t know of anyone who has had outrageously long waits for operations.
Patients never get any bills for procedures. You pay your copay when leaving the hospital or the doctor’s office and then everything else is taken care of. The down side is that doctors only make a modest amount of money, about $120,000 per year.
One out of 10 Germans are covered by private insurance, which is for-profit. Anyone making a good salary (as well as politicians and public employees) can opt to have private coverage. It can end up being cheaper. For example, if you only visit the doctor a couple of times in a year, you can get part of your premium back. Also, private insurance reimburses doctors at about double the rate of the sickness funds. So doctors really like to treat privately-insured patients. Which means that privately insured people can often jump to the front of the line, bypassing public health care patients. Also, you can get special treatment such as a TV in your room (yes, German hospitals are very spare) or the exclusive attention of the head honcho doctor.
But the bottom line is that everyone is covered. Showing proof of health insurance is a requisite for immigrants wanting to get a visa and can’t be opted out of by employers or employees. So we have universal coverage. The system isn’t as cheap as some of the other systems: it costs 10.7 percent of the GDP. But since the quality is good enough and there are no long waits, most people seem fairly content.
For those wanting more in-depth information, Frontline had an excellent interview with a German healthcare expert which can be read here.
(photo credit: zoomar)
These two Onion satires are classics. The first is just before Bush was elected in 2001, the second comes after Obama’s election:
“Bush: Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over”
Bush swore to do “everything in [his] power” to undo the damage wrought by Clinton’s two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
“Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”
In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it.
There’s nothing like a bracing sea breeze to blow away all one’s worries. Sylt was absolutely out of this world. Unbeatable seafood! Sand dunes! Thatched roof brick houses that look like hobbit dwellings! It doesn’t take much to make me happy.
Plus, Sylt represents the farthest north I’ve ever set foot. Here are the coodinates: latitude 54-55N, longitude 008-21E, elevation: 16 m. As for the elevation, Sylt has lost a lot of coastline to rising sea levels. It’s such a skinny little island that most likely by the end of this century there will be nothing left of it. So visit while you still can.
For more photos, check out the entry below.
