UnitedHealth Group CEO concedes health system 'does not work as well as it should'

[DFW]

16. A patchwork built over decades.

That is exactly the word, “patchwork,” I have used to describe the German health insurance system ever since my first personal encounter with it. Luckily, I had one of the friendly natives (my wife) to help explain it to me, and help me navigate it. When my quote came in ($35,000 a year), I said Danke, but nein danke. You need health insurance before you can get a residence permit here, but luckily the Germans bought the fiction that Blue Cross, which is what I have, is really health insurance. If United is a one on a scale of 100, then Blue Cross is maybe a two and a half.

I keep seeing the fiction that health care and insurance is free in Germany perpetuated, even here on DU, but it remains a fiction. Still, at least the German patchwork has far fewer holes than the American patchwork. The number of Germans without health insurance numbers in the hundreds of thousands, where in the USA, the number is in the tens of millions