I was telling my dad that in most of the world you don't have to pay for healthcare OR school and in some cases pension and my older brother immediately runs out (American Nationalist has entered the chat) and starts bleating about how none of that is true
This directly contradicts my experience with people I've known from the EU who paid fuck all for braces, healthcare, school, etc but he will always say "I know people from there" (which I'm assuming is a bunch of right wing shitheels from 4chan with a boner for the USA and unironic Ukrainians) but I get the feeling he is full of shit
he always tells me "mental health is cheap/free in the USA" when he bludgeons me with that and this also directly contradicts my experience of being told that my dads insurance only covers 4 sessions of therapy and that the copay will be $225 dollars an hour when I was 12
what the hell is the truth lmao
In South Africa public healthcare payment is based on a sliding scale depending on how much you earn. People that are unemployed, pensioners or earn below a certain amount don't pay anything. As far a I know, there are four or five payment tiers. The highest tier is medical aid rates (this will make sense later). However they'll treat you no matter if you can afford the bull or mot. Unfortunately public hospitals can't really help with certain very specialised things things as they need to hire/contact specialists externally and some specialists do not go into a lot of public hospitals anymore as they do not feel that the infrastructure is good enough to carry out very specialised procedures. So they are exclusively in the private healthcare space. But that's only a problem for less than 1% of people if I'd have to guess, a lot of specialists still work in the public space.
In private healthcare, it's very expensive (still cheap compared to the USA of course). Generally, unless you have a ton of cash, you need a medical aid (kind of like health insurance) to access private care. Standard of care is generally higher (not always).