By S.G.Kazolias, January 14, 2015.
Greenlanders ! Think thrice before opting to become Americans.
Denmark offers free, universal, healthcare for all. In the US you will have to pay through the teeth for private insurance which covers little in comparison, and with which you will spend much time fighting to get them to cover what they are supposed to. When you get to a US hospital, they will ask you for your credit card before they ask you where it hurts and will discharge you much sooner than the Danes.
The reason why there are fewer deaths reported in the hospitals in the US is because they send people home to die to keep their statistics favorable. You won’t be sent home to suffer by the Danes if you are terminal.
Life expectancy in the US is declining, suffering its worst decline since the 1920s, while in the EU it is increasing. Because hospitals and doctors are so expensive in the US, the least injury or serious illness could lead you to bankruptcy or decades of debt repayments. You may have to sell your home.
Did you say homeschooling?
When it comes to the education of your children, the quality of the teachers, their salaries, and the school equipment they have will depend in great part on the tax bracket of the people who live in your school district. If you live in a poor area, there is good chance salaries will be lower and won’t attract the best teachers. Local school taxes can be very high, driving lower income families and minorities out of the district.
Local Boards of Education and states have a great say in what is taught, thus several states have banned Harper Lee’s anti-racism novel: To Kill A Mockingbird. Many states are even discussing whether to ban teaching evolution or to teach it on a par in science class with ‘creationism.’ You won’t find a negation of science, nor its watering down in the Danish national school system.
If you want to privatize a public service, you do your best to make the public service as dysfunctional as possible. There is a big, neo-conservative, movement in the US to privitize grade schools, just as there is for the United States Postal Service; the first public service created by the Founding Fathers to make sure there were communications lines to keep the states “United.”
If you think privatization is the way to go, have a look at British Rail. In France, the privatization of EDF electricity was such a disaster the government had to retake full control of it in 2022. EDF still produces the electricity in state financed nuclear power stations and sells it at a loss to the private companies to distribute. Welfare for the rich? And GDF gas, now ENGIE (36% government owned), only meant the taxpayer foots the bill for private companies leaching off the publicly funded infrastructure.
Orange1 (formally France Télécom), partially privatized with state participation, still maintains the network used by the private providers.2
There is growing resistance in Europe to the privitization of public utilities so much wanted by the technocrats in Brussels.
In Denmark, getting a university education is free. No such perks in the US. If you want to send your kid to a halfway decent college, you will have to fork out at least $25,000 a year in tuition. Then come the books, materials, lodging and food. Yes, you get what you pay for in the US and the more you pay, the better the school. But Danish universities are also noted as being high quality.
In the US, graduates will spend years, even decades, paying off the loans they took out to pay for college.
In Denmark Workers have Rights. In USA, not so much.
In Denmark there are labor laws which protect the employee from abuse by the employer. You can’t just tell someone to pack his things and go home unless there is gross misconduct. In Denmark the boss must provide, in writing, sufficient reasoning for the termination. No such right in the US. In Denmark the employer must give warning from one month for an employee with less than six months in the company up to six months warning for nine years or more. In general, collective agreements give an employee a generous severance package.
In Denmark you get a minimum of five weeks paid vacation every year. Ask an American worker how much paid vacation he gets, and he will laugh in your face most likely. Others, especially executives and midlevel management may get two weeks paid leave after a few years in the company.
Affordable, and available, public housing? Cheap and efficient public transportation? You had better stick with Denmark.
Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that anything the government does smells of “socialism,” even “communism,” as if socialism is a bad thing. Yet, so many are too uneducated to understand that the Medicare and Medicaid programs they want maintained are government run and financed, and yes, smell of socialism.
The only people who get free, universal and quality, healthcare, free higher education, and affordable public housing, on the US government dime are … the Israelis! Go figure.
- Orange is well known for the high rate of suicides since its privitization. ↩︎
- Thierry Breton, the disgraced European Commissioner for the EU Internal Market and former CEO of Rhodia France Télécome, investigated for accounting irregularities and price fixing to the consumer’s detriment, recently bragged about how the EU could prevent the AfD from taking power in German elections like they had in Romania in December, 2024.
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