"Social" Sweden - increasingly oriented towards market healthcare

Turning to the market

In Sweden, a country known for its generous welfare state that has been severely cut in recent years, a phenomenon is being observed that will hardly please those Americans who believe that the answer to the problems of Obamacare (b.p. – the popular name for the Affordable Care Act, introduced by President Obama, obliging Americans to buy health insurance packages) is greater government intervention in health care. (b.p. – or those Bulgarians who believe that the health system will improve from a national health card, fingerprints, limits, etc.). Tired of long waits and inadequate care, more and more Swedes are buying private health insurance policies to gain access to services that the state cannot provide them.

According to the Swedish insurers' association, Svensk Försäkring, "the number of private health insurance policies has increased in recent years. In 2011, around 440,000 people had private health insurance. For most of them, the insurance is provided by the employer."

Similar information is reported by the English-language The Local, which states that “one in ten Swedes has private health insurance.” The site also says that “over 500,000 people have health insurance,” which seems to be referring to newly acquired ones, as well as well over half a million of Sweden’s 9.5 million population already have such.

What is causing this trend?

The Local writes:

"It's quicker to get back to work if you have surgery in two weeks than to have to wait a whole year," says privately insured Anna Norlander. "It's terrible that as a young person I don't trust our healthcare system to take care of me."

In another article about Sweden's shrinking welfare state, The Local notes that "visitors are sometimes surprised to learn that cancer patients have to wait a year."

Matthew Feeney told Reason that the Swedish welfare state is more of a brief interim period in its history:

"Until the 1970s, Sweden had a strongly market-oriented economy that increased wealth and raised living standards thanks to reforms introduced in the late 19th century. These reforms were extensive, affecting both the economy and the law. Property rights were well protected, government was limited, regulations were light, and the private banking sector flourished."

The "cradle-to-grave" social programs introduced in the 1970s proved too unprofitable in the early 1990s.

"In the years following the crisis of the 1990s, Sweden deregulated entire industries and began privatizing public services. Some Swedish hospitals were privatized, and the country's education system is the most market-oriented in the world, with a voucher program and for-profit schools."

“Income tax in Sweden is now lower than in France, Belgium and Denmark,” I write in The Local, “and public spending as a share of GDP has shrunk from a record 71% in 1993 to 53.3% in 2014” (b.p. - still too high).

And of course Swedes are turning to private medicine to escape the long lines and poor quality services of public healthcare, which fails to deliver what it once promised.

You can see the original article HERE

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