I guess most people writing in this forum are highly paid professionals
I don’t think having money is the biggest thing. The biggest thing is that you care for your health and are pro-active about it.
Sadly, most of the population (of any western country) doesn’t really care. For example I know a man who reported bleeding from, shall we say, somewhere where this would be very worrying. He went to his doctor. A few months of tests followed. It turned out to be something that wasn’t life threatening and eventually healed up. I asked him what tests he had done, and he didn’t really know. And he is an electronics engineer – not dumb.
The UK NHS relies on most people being like that. If everybody who walks in spent a day researching their symptoms on google, the system would collapse, and not only because if you research any symptom on google you will become convinced that you will die the next day 
Pre Obamacare 20-25% of every premium $ went not to patient care but fees for administering the plan which included profits
Only 25%? That’s an absolutely astonishing efficiency. I am sure the NHS gets nowhere near that.
Recently, the political left wanted switzerland to replace private healthcare insurance by a mandatory government administered healthcare insurance. When lobbying for their proposal, they found it outrageous that money spent on insurance administration was 5 to 7% This proposal was massively rejected in the vote 63:37 (normally, votes turn out 52:48 or something like that).
Only 25%? That’s an absolutely astonishing efficiency. I am sure the NHS gets nowhere near that.
The NHS spends about 15%
which has ballooned from the 5% or so spent on administration prior to the creation of the internal market.
Of course, this would be completely justifiable if it has increased the efficiency of the rest of the NHS sufficiently to pay for itself. Which it probably hasn’t.
I don’t know how to explain it, but one of the best and most efficient healthcare systems I know is run by the state. It does involve private care providers and private intermediaries, but the fees and benefits are state-mandated and quite reasonable. I am talking of Israel. As far as I remember, healthcare tax is 5.5% of one’s income, and you pay a fee of about 5 EUR when visiting a doctor, up to a maximum of about 30 EUR per 3 months. The coverage doesn’t run out if you use it a whole lot (e.g. for cancer patients), and includes such non-emergency services as in-vitro fertilisation.
The coverage doesn’t run out if you use it a whole lot (e.g. for cancer patients), and includes such non-emergency services as in-vitro fertilisation.
Yes, yes, but does it cover contraception?
I don’t think having money is the biggest thing. The biggest thing is that you care for your health and are pro-active about it.
There is a clear correlation between the two, or at least that people with higher income have better health (generally speaking, of course).
But what I meant is that if you have plenty of money, you can afford healthcare no matter how the system is set up.
Coffee and blood pressure
Does anyone here avoid coffee before a medical, in case it affects their blood pressure reading?
I was interested to see that there is an effect and it can last for up to three hours according to this study.
The good news is that coffee drinking has no lasting impact on BP and it has lots of health benefits including a protective effect on DNA.
As to the medical, in Spain there is a requirement to eat or drink nothing (except water) for upto 8 hours before they extract a blood sample, so no coffee anyway..
The yearly blood sample is required for the class one medical. And a urine sample. I wouldn’t know how to give that without having had my usual three or four cups of coffee in the morning (we have no requirement here to go to the medical with empty stomach!) Still the girl who took the readings was a little worried over my blood pressure last time: 90 over 55 or so. But I had been swimming a lot last summer and fall. Now it will be back to something like 110 over 60.
Many years ago when I lived in Italy I remember reading about a study where some medical scientist found out that 125 cups of coffee (Italian ones = espresso) per day have no ill effect on health. The number 125 was not some physiological upper limit but simply the maximum number of coffees their subjects were able to drink in one day…
No. I too am an avid coffee drinker, and my blood pressure figures are quite constant and quite acceptable.
What I did have problems with was too much sugar in urine (simple dipstick test at 7 pm or so), the solution was and is a complete blood analysis from samples taken early in the morning. My AME knows the issue and has no problem to accept the results from the (approved) test lab.
PS no blood sampling required by AME for class 2 , here in BE. But I do it, voluntarily, because it is good to check the other figures (cholesterol and such) and it avoids the issues with urine sugar levels.
PPSS I use to start my day with half a litre of quite strong coffee, and can feel, from the (drop in) brain efficiency, the end of its effect, which usually is some 3 or 4 hours later indeed.
