?SEVEN MILLION people living in France without access to the previous health care system?
This is perfectly true. At that time the ?40 million Americans don?t have insurance? line was already popular.
Maybe the American system is not good, maybe socialism is the right thing, I don?t know.
But I would like to give my own experience of the French ?so generous? public hospital.
At that time, I didn?t have any health insurance.
I had my nose broken in a violent shock with someone else?s head. My nose was bleeding from a large cut on the bridge. I was dizzy from the shock, a friend of mine took me to the hospital, to the emergency room?
The nurse there told me I had to wait (patients with insurance had priority). So I stood 3 hours. When I asked the nurse for a tissue or something to sponge my nose and stop the bleeding she answered me she couldn?t do anything until a physician had seen me. So I used my shirt ! Yes ! my own shirt, there, in the emergency room. The floor was stained with blood. Everybody was staring at me but no nurse no physician nobody cared. It was weird because I was inside the hospital, but not really. So close but not there yet. Without that health insurance, it was like I was invisible. A second class citizen.
Finally a nurse came to me and drove me to a physician. He just touched my nose : ?yes ! It?s broken, but here, we don?t have the equipment to see how bad it is, your going to have to go to another hospital and then go to see a specialist? Actually, I just needed x-rays !
Then he let me in the arms of the nurse (well, she was very kind, at least). She put a few strips on my cut and I went away.
A few weeks later I received the bill from them.
That hospital is near Vincennes, a suburb of Paris.
The last time I went to an emergency room, it was early in the morning, this summer (I have now an health insurance), I found nobody there. Fortunately, it was not really an emergency (just a bad conjunctivitis that kept me awake all night) but there was nothing except a board with this written on it : ?come back later?
That hospital is the Hôpital Bichat-Claude Bernard in Paris.
Now, everybody has to know our social security system has a huge deficit. It is stretched to the maximum (that explains the heat mortality of this summer and the lack of personnel). But somebody is going to have to pay. Socialist or not.