Iread your expostulations on healthcare and Iceland, Joe, and found them both interesting topics. Several comments follow.
First, Iceland is a very small nation, geographically speaking, with a population of roughly only 322K souls (human type), so any comparisons between their healthcare system and ours (with a population of about 300 MM) suffer somewhat in the nonce.
As for the store owner in Reykjavik's take on capitalism, I couldn't agree more! The American capitalist model is an insidious, inherently selfish and greedy system, whereas as has often been pointed out by noted economist/ philosophers, 'responsible capitalism' is exactly as the store owner pointed out. Self-responsibility is manifest in responsible capitalism and taking pride and concern over one's community (and fellows) are the norm. Under the enlightened precepts of the latter system, responsible capitalism recognises its debt to the common weal and the greater good of its citizens, and conducts its affairs accordingly. In other words, Icelandic responsible capitalism contains a healthy (if well moderated) dollop of socialism in its matrix.
The American medicine establishment began as a unique, self-invented system around a powerful American Medical Association that sought to both elevate the status and increase the income of its members (who before it was founded were held almost equal in regard with the town drunk in most small frontier communities). Having established itself as THE power underlying medicine in America, the doctors’ new professional association played an exclusive game amongst themselves...until the huge nursing establishment grow up to challenge them, somewhat later, and contested their preeminent status in a power-sharing context. About that time, the multi-billion-dollar corporate pharmas sided with the docs and together they pretty much locked-up the game...until Henry Kaiser came along during WW2 and established the first American HMO.
Medical physicians were thereafter dragged kicking and screaming all the way to an eventual (if highly reluctant) compromise agreement to cooperate with both the doctors and the pharmas to divide the market share of American health in an unholy three-way split. As if that weren't enough, the American legal establishment soon rose up and demanded an huge amount of influence in the functional mechanics of the healthcare consumer market profitability dynamics.
Today, the HMO bean-counters reign supreme across the land and make no mistake: it's not (and never has been) about high-quality healthcare...it's about satisfying investors and making them flush with profit. And of course, even after Medicare and national health insurance schemes sought to redress this perverse mishmash of conflicting, profiteering interests, sure enough, the lawyers found a way to adjudicate the mess to their advantage. In short, American healthcare is a thoroughly fuc*ked-up mess in which the consumer-customer invariably gets it in the shorts! If famed socialist-economist Ivan Illich could see what America's health care system has evolved into today, he'd probably be rolling over in his grave!
On a personal level, as a medical person I circulated among medical people, both professionally and socially, for almost 50s years. Early in my life I quickly realised the benefits of being romantically involved with nurses (and young female interns). I still think such a pair-up is great (only bested by MD/JD matches, which are in a class of their own!) and nurses make excellent life-partners!.
Sadly, today America has one of the highest-priced, lowest quality-of-care systems in the entire world and even when you are paying HUGE health insurance premiums, you'll still likely to get marginal care at best. Henry J. Kaiser's original HMO alone (to cite merely one example) has morphed into an over-subscribed monster that provides excellent in-patient care but only marginal clinical care at best. Similarly, almost all HMOs now run a tightly controlled process that 'runs 'em in and runs 'em out' so fast that your chances of getting accurately diagnosed at a typical office-visit are rather slim. The latest video 'virtual appointment' that HMOs are pushing into widespread use (and that have grown since the SAES-CoV-2 pandemic) are even worse!
My advice? Go back to Iceland, a scenically beautiful country populated with wonderful, no-nonsense people and blessed with an enlightened system of government, before the rest of America realises that we're in a graveyard spiral and floods Iceland’s borders there like the American southern border immigrants are in Texas! As a matter of fact, book a couple of seats for wifey & me, while you're at it, eh! ;))
Thanks for some thought-provoking commentary, Joe!
