Sorry, for what you had to go through and glad that you are ok. As a German reader, let me decode your German health care experience for you:
> "I scheduled an online consultation with a German doctor. (It was absurdly easy and cheap to do so.) That doctor told me: you should probably go to urgent care. Which, as loath as I was to admit i…
Sorry, for what you had to go through and glad that you are ok. As a German reader, let me decode your German health care experience for you:
> "I scheduled an online consultation with a German doctor. (It was absurdly easy and cheap to do so.) That doctor told me: you should probably go to urgent care. Which, as loath as I was to admit it, made sense."
It was easy because you were paying for it out of pocket. The German health care system has two tiers: the statutory-insured and the privately insured. Statutory health insurance is mandatory up to a certain salary cap and medical professionals may charge private insurances around three-times what they can charge the statutory insurances - in short, private insurance is a) for rich people and b) what keeps the system financially solvent. If you pay out of pocket, you are treated like a privately insured patient, hence it is easy and fast to get appointments.
> "So, Mrs. Volts came back and we went to the Hamburg University Hospital ER around 2:00 p.m. We stood in line for six hours (well, she stood, I sat doubled over in a crappy chair) before even speaking to anyone. Then they whisked me to a different waiting room, stuck an IV in my arm, and we waited for 2.5 hours more."
Congratulations, you waited just about exactly the culturally appropriate amount of time to go to the ER. The health care system in Germany is one of the last vestiges of Prussian culture - not for softies and malingerers. You are too polite to mention it, but you were probably wondering about some of the other people at the ER. These days you find all sorts of non-urgent conditions in the ER including - literally - moskito bites. Hence the 6 hour wait. There are a couple of reasons for that. Firstly and less importantly, we have had a lot of immigration from countries where a) the culture around pain and disease is very different and b) hospitals are the premier entry points of the health care system. Not so in Germany! You generally go see your doctor and only end up at the hospital in an emergency or once explicitly referred there.
Secondly and more importantly, the public insurance tier of the health care system has experienced a steep decline in recent years. Specifically, it takes forever to get appointments with specialists. So you might have to wait 3 months to have that weird thing checked out which you fear might be cancer; OR you go to the ER and claim you are in acute pain. Problem solved.
> "Second, I got a roommate, who Mrs. Volts and I took to referring to as Oscar."
At extra cost, you could have upgraded to a private room.
> "There was no curtain or divider, so I would become intimately familiar with the rhythm and odor of Oscar’s various bags being changed."
Yup, what I said earlier about Prussia.
> "somehow the hospital food was even worse than all the clichés about hospital food"
Again, Prussia. How dare you think that you ought to be made comfortable in a hospital? We don't want you staying there one minute more than necessary! Kidding aside, nowadays this has become an embarrassment even to my doctor friends who when pointed to this will blush and mumble something like "yes, we still have to learn to develop more of a service culture...".
> "Our insurance doesn’t cover us when we’re overseas, so we ended up paying out of pocket for all of it."
What you did not have ze travel healz insurance???!!! Germans are crazy about insurances in general and specifically about travel insurance. Most people are ridiculously overinsured and as a consequence, travel health insurance is dirt cheap. My family goes to my wife's native Kenya every year or so and basically every year we get more out of our travel health insurance than we pay in.
> That thought scared me at first, but all told, our bill was, conservatively, about 1/30th what we would have paid out of pocket in the US."
And - as I mentioned above - this is already the premium tier! My son needed tonsill surgery recently and we were faced with a choice to wait until some time in 2025 for an appointment or to pay part of it out of pocket. We ended up paying around 200 Dollar ourselves and got an appointment swiftly (although a one hour drive away).
Generally however, unfortunately the increasingly rapid decline is undeniable. While politicians and doctors will publicly insist that the publicly and privately insured receive the same medical care, the reality is that crazy waiting times for appoinments and hidden rationing force the publicly-insured to pay out of pocket or game the system. And you cannot go private unless you earn above the salary cap!
I am glad to hear that at least you still had a better experience than in the US-healthcare system.
Sorry, for what you had to go through and glad that you are ok. As a German reader, let me decode your German health care experience for you:
> "I scheduled an online consultation with a German doctor. (It was absurdly easy and cheap to do so.) That doctor told me: you should probably go to urgent care. Which, as loath as I was to admit it, made sense."
It was easy because you were paying for it out of pocket. The German health care system has two tiers: the statutory-insured and the privately insured. Statutory health insurance is mandatory up to a certain salary cap and medical professionals may charge private insurances around three-times what they can charge the statutory insurances - in short, private insurance is a) for rich people and b) what keeps the system financially solvent. If you pay out of pocket, you are treated like a privately insured patient, hence it is easy and fast to get appointments.
> "So, Mrs. Volts came back and we went to the Hamburg University Hospital ER around 2:00 p.m. We stood in line for six hours (well, she stood, I sat doubled over in a crappy chair) before even speaking to anyone. Then they whisked me to a different waiting room, stuck an IV in my arm, and we waited for 2.5 hours more."
Congratulations, you waited just about exactly the culturally appropriate amount of time to go to the ER. The health care system in Germany is one of the last vestiges of Prussian culture - not for softies and malingerers. You are too polite to mention it, but you were probably wondering about some of the other people at the ER. These days you find all sorts of non-urgent conditions in the ER including - literally - moskito bites. Hence the 6 hour wait. There are a couple of reasons for that. Firstly and less importantly, we have had a lot of immigration from countries where a) the culture around pain and disease is very different and b) hospitals are the premier entry points of the health care system. Not so in Germany! You generally go see your doctor and only end up at the hospital in an emergency or once explicitly referred there.
Secondly and more importantly, the public insurance tier of the health care system has experienced a steep decline in recent years. Specifically, it takes forever to get appointments with specialists. So you might have to wait 3 months to have that weird thing checked out which you fear might be cancer; OR you go to the ER and claim you are in acute pain. Problem solved.
> "Second, I got a roommate, who Mrs. Volts and I took to referring to as Oscar."
At extra cost, you could have upgraded to a private room.
> "There was no curtain or divider, so I would become intimately familiar with the rhythm and odor of Oscar’s various bags being changed."
Yup, what I said earlier about Prussia.
> "somehow the hospital food was even worse than all the clichés about hospital food"
Again, Prussia. How dare you think that you ought to be made comfortable in a hospital? We don't want you staying there one minute more than necessary! Kidding aside, nowadays this has become an embarrassment even to my doctor friends who when pointed to this will blush and mumble something like "yes, we still have to learn to develop more of a service culture...".
> "Our insurance doesn’t cover us when we’re overseas, so we ended up paying out of pocket for all of it."
What you did not have ze travel healz insurance???!!! Germans are crazy about insurances in general and specifically about travel insurance. Most people are ridiculously overinsured and as a consequence, travel health insurance is dirt cheap. My family goes to my wife's native Kenya every year or so and basically every year we get more out of our travel health insurance than we pay in.
> That thought scared me at first, but all told, our bill was, conservatively, about 1/30th what we would have paid out of pocket in the US."
And - as I mentioned above - this is already the premium tier! My son needed tonsill surgery recently and we were faced with a choice to wait until some time in 2025 for an appointment or to pay part of it out of pocket. We ended up paying around 200 Dollar ourselves and got an appointment swiftly (although a one hour drive away).
Generally however, unfortunately the increasingly rapid decline is undeniable. While politicians and doctors will publicly insist that the publicly and privately insured receive the same medical care, the reality is that crazy waiting times for appoinments and hidden rationing force the publicly-insured to pay out of pocket or game the system. And you cannot go private unless you earn above the salary cap!
I am glad to hear that at least you still had a better experience than in the US-healthcare system.