“Sweden still sets hearts racing across Europe. The "Swedish model" might bring up thoughts of a nubile blonde rather than a strong social state, but it is in the latter incarnation that my home country stirs the passions of left-leaning Europeans. Whatever Sweden does must be right, or so reason progressive politicians and Guardian journalists – not to mention scores of Swedes. But beyond this blue-eyed vision lurks a darker reality. …
Swedes were roused from this dream with the 1986 assassination of prime minister Olof Palme. Palme might have left behind "a country where no one was poor and no one had room for optimism" as Andrew Brown puts it, but it was Sweden's homemade financial meltdown of the 1990s that finally killed off the dream. Poverty was added to the pessimism. Savage cuts hit schools, unemployment rocketed, the krona sank – leaving the social system in a disarray from which it has not recovered. …
Take healthcare. Swedes do not enjoy free public care: it costs to see a GP. That is, if you manage to see one. Queues are long and scandals rack the system. Psychiatric care, the source of many such scandals, has a near-medieval penchant for authoritarianism with few European equivalents. People are locked up for months for not taking medicine, given no therapy, and spat out of the system into despair and destitution. The mentally ill die in wards and in outpatient isolation. And they do not even have charities to turn to because state-run healthcare is supposed to work: this is Sweden, after all.
Those who do enjoy Sweden's second-rate public services are lucky. Undocumented migrants, who lack a "personal number", are barred from day-to-day healthcare. Foreigners do not fit easily into a social system built on the postwar notion of the folkhem, or people's home, whose rightful inhabitants are the native Swedes. … This is Sweden, after all.
Even being in the system is less rewarding than it was. Unemployment benefits are falling behind those of other countries, and access to social security involves Big Brother-style controls most Europeans would abhor. … Norwegian lawyers have sued over privacy infringement, leaving the prime minister perplexed – because in Sweden, the state is there to help us.
…
Admittedly, Sweden might seem a haven of tranquillity compared with other European states. But in the hunt for a humane social model, Sweden no longer provides the blueprint. Europe's progressives will have to construct something new. But to do that, those who let their minds drift northwards for inspiration first have to wake up: the Swedish dream is over.”
Ruben Andersson, “Death of the super model”, The Guardian (29 June 2009).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/29/swedish-economy-social-state
Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist, writer and journalist based in London.
Government-run health care is more or less the same over the world in one respect: Compared to care available in the private sector, it involves longer-waits for care, rationing of procedures by bureaucratic formula, low capital investment and hence fewer and lower quality medical equipment, little to no personal attention, limited choice in physicians and care givers, and very high taxes to support what is called “free health care”.
Granted that private markets do not work well in the delivery of health care. And it is certainly true that private health delivery systems are less than perfect, especially as the relate to the quality of care available to different segments of the population. But it is even truer that public health delivery systems are sub-standard compared to the private system. Yet despite this we here in the U.S. seem determined to replace a less than perfect private system with an even more inferior government-run system.
I for one find this strange.
Thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer to the article.
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