PolyPassport recently profiled a Texan woman and her family’s journey from the US to France in search of more affordable healthcare and saner politics. They had EU passports on the basis of ancestry.
It reinforces a lot of the stereotypes we have about healthcare in Europe, particularly on pricing and access overall. Cataract surgery cost her some 300 EUR (!) and her daughter receives free prosthetics every two years.
But her story does dispel the notion that anyone, anywhere can just walk into an EU hospital and get treated—including EU citizens. That’s consistent with my own experience. I’ve lived in a few EU countries and certainly paid less for often high-quality care than in the US. But I never found it to be straightforward or necessarily leagues better than equivalent systems, say, in Asia. Like the woman in the article, I also missed speaking to providers in my native language about ailments that can’t often be conveyed with an A2 level proficiency! :)
It got me thinking about the trade-offs we face when chasing healthcare (or anything really) abroad. It’s about balancing the good with the not-so-good and making the most of our choices wherever we go.
Food for thought and a point discussion.
Great post and always something I think about when I enter into conversations about (or post on topics related to) moving out of the country. Healthcare in the US has significant issues but I find the reality of the challenges to be greatly inflated by people posting on Reddit (or generally online). My career leads me to interact with injured people daily. The majority of these people make less than the median US income. Almost none of the people I interact with (<5%) express any insecurities about how they will obtain future medical care. I find it very interesting how so many people in the US expat community appear to want to pickup and move their lives primarily due to this issue.