Socialized medicine is back on every American’s mind thanks to President Obama, and Americans are once again skeptical. And I’m not surprised.

Finland prides itself on one of the best socialized health care systems in the world – Surely a role model for the United States! Well, Finland’s “free” health care is no longer covering Swine Flu…

A government decision to remove swine flu from the list of generally hazardous communicable diseases officially comes into effect on Monday. Cases will now be handled in the same manner as seasonal flus.

Experts say that the H1N1 has become so widespread that special measures involving individual treatment will no longer prevent its further spread.

Most treatment of the virus will now be transferred from specialist hospital wards to health centres. They will concentrate on treating patients belonging to risk groups such as pregnant mothers, the long-term ill and small infants.

The decision also means that patients will now be charged for physicians’ services, medication and possible hospital treatment.

So if you get Swine Flu, and you’re broke, you’ll spread it everyone you know, but fortunately you’ll die before that happens. LOL!!

The Finns heard “oink! oink!” while in Mexico but didn’t flinch, they needed to hear “röh! röh!“…

On Tuesday morning health officials confirmed the country’s first two cases of swine flu. The two infected Finns returned from a trip to Mexico City and Cancun via Amsterdam on May 6. Their flight arrived at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport at 9:45 p.m. Health officials urge people who were on the same flight to contact their health care provider if they begin to show symptoms of fever or respiratory illness.

The first of the patients became ill on May 6, and the second a couple of days later, according to officials speaking at a Ministry of Health and Social Affairs press conference on Tuesday.

I’m losing hair in strange places on the back of my head – it’s called “Alopecia areata” and is different from traditional male balding. It affects 0.1%-0.2% of the population and while most will see the hair regrow without any treatment, I haven’t been so lucky. It’s not contagious unless you read the blog of someone who suffers from the condition.

I went to the dermatologist for treatment and was prescribed “Propecia” which is standard, prescription-strength hairloss pills. KELA doesn’t cover any of the costs, so I’ve been paying an insane 196€ every three months for my necessary dosage.

After a year I’ve seen slow results on my problem spot (yet my reseeding hairline has grown back! …along with some extra backhair above my ass), so I asked the doctor for an alternative, he said Propecia was the best.

I complained about the high costs and he wrote me a prescription for “Gefina” which is designed to treat the prostate, but is the exact same stuff as Propecia. They come in 500mg tablets, but I just need to cut them down into 100mg-150mg pieces and take one daily.

He gave me a prescription for 120 tablets (600 days of doses for me) which I got from the pharmacy, the total cost…11.63€ (for 100 tablets)!! The pharmacist had a funny grin on her face when she asked, “Did your doctor instruct you how to take these?”, I laughed and said, “He did. One last question, where’s your pill cutters?” LOL!!!!

I’ve been trying to get away from politics lately, but couldn’t resist this one titled, “Public Healthcare System: ‘Teetering on Edge of Collapse‘” from YLE…

Private doctors’ clinics have seem to have gained a stranglehold on the public health care system. Analysts are predicting that the current practices could lead to the collapse of the municipal health care system.

[...]Uusitupa says behind the move towards privatisation is a new attitude among physicians – the ethic is not the same as it was before.

“Young doctors are putting themselves first more. They want to enjoy their lives and are not as committed to maintaining and developing our public health care system,” he declared.

You mean, doctors would rather “enjoy their lives” and make a decent living than maintain some failing socialist ideology!?! ASSHOLES!!! (lol!)

The Finnish gun control debate got fuel from the recent school shootings that were placed a year apart. A lot of discussion was made about school bullying, alienated youth and the evils of the internet as well as the downsizing and lack of funds in youth mental care. Calls were made for the government to give more funding – of course this being a cosmetic fix as the whole mental health programme has slowly been cheesesliced silly.

Yesterday brought again some news showing that the welfare society isn’t faring that well. Two middle-aged couples were found dead in their homes. In Porvoo a policeman and his wife in their 40’s had both committed suicide by the man’s quite legal hunting weapons leaving a note. They police say both had been depressed also with physical ailments and there has been speculation that the suicide may have been triggered by the social welfare removing three foster children they had been caring for . Meanwhile in Helsinki two schoolage kids were orphaned when their parents were found dead in their home. The police have stated that the neighbours called the police after hearing a row and shots, the man apparently shot the women with an army service weapon and after that himself .

Only last week in Oulu a 43-year old man shot his 39 year old wife and children aged 11 and 9. Both parents were teachers at the local schools, and were living an outwardly happy life. Some financial troubles were looming ahead as they were building a new house just getting finishing touches but their old house they were selling was showing water damage, in what is called a “two home trap”.

So really, I am at loss to even guess as to where the politicians shall point the blame this time over, can’t be the evils of the internet nor school bullying and legal hunting weapons are commonplace not to mention people who professionally have access to firearms. Of course the weather’s been quite horrid and the world finances have toppled, but even as a trigger to melancholia that doesn’t explain what then makes adult, educated, professional people in their late 40’s do such drastic decisions? Financial troubles are usually in the background in a downward spiral but is it a cause or effect or both. The economists say the trends don’t follow a pattern necessarily.

And this isn’t restricted to only one age group. Last July an elderly 88 year old man killed his bedridden wife at the nursing home and shot himself after killing his two handicapped daughters in their 50’s leaving a message he couldn’t cope with it any more. So it isn’t just the one thing but a combination.

I think we are just now starting to reap the seeds of all this privatization and moving towards a competitive economy that was started in the 1990’s. There are services, but there is no outreach, and usually the people in most dire need cannot or won’t seek the help themselves. And even those who do need to take drastic measures – just in the summer a young man in Kerava stabbed an 14-year old girl just picking her random, as a motive he said “he wished treatment”.  Nevermind all the county finances having been cheesesliced to the minimum already so what would you expect the health care, let alone mental healthcare at a bare minimum.

The orthodox chaplain Father Mitro said that it is evident that along with prosperity there has also been the flipside people have been closing their eyes from, and it should be the whole society to take a stand on what is going on. He said that instead of having floral agendas the government should inspire the people and reach out. The former chair of the Mental Health Association Pirkko Lahti says that she is afraid these events will not remain the only ones and fears they might lead to an epidemic as people will see this as a way out of their situation. She says that people should go ask for help and she feels especially sorry for the five orphaned children.

Of course as the international newsvultures haven’t landed to feed on the carrion the government has poked its head into the sand and discusses more relevant and current issues, like political correctness training to the new councils. Probably they’ll allocate funds to some nice brochures showing how happy and joyful place Finland is, after all its positive thinking and prozac that shall save the world. And then they still wonder why the people “voted wrong”.

A small piece of news struck my eye yesterday and made me thoughtful. Theres been a restructuring of the 112 call centres into a national organization instead of the previous county-run regional units since the 2000’s, and the results have been a bit questionable. The nationalization of the Helsinki emergency centre has been blasted as the restructuring has caused and stated that the safety in the region has come down. Another question is the services in the Swedish-speaking areas.

Basically before you also had the police as well as ambulances or fire departments have their own numbers you could call for “less emergency” so you’d call the “emergency number” when the house was on fire, but the lesser number when the cat was up the tree. But now you deal only with the 112 with all kinds of nonsense. Which isn’t anything peculiar to just Finland.

The new reform into larger units also caused some problems as many villages and towns have similar or the same streetnames, and the 112 operators weren’t necessarily that versed with the area. So in 2002 a “middle aged woman” who worked on the west coast got a warning from the court as she’d directed an ambulance to the wrong city and a man with chest pains died of a heart attack.

The yesterdays piece of news said that the same woman had been fined in court for negligence of duty and stripped of her office, as she had cut approximately a hundred 112 calls that then had redirected to other operators in 2006. She had logged these as missed calls or wrong numbers. Apparently the stress and workload at the 112 centre had overwhelmed her – maybe the first mishap was a cause or a symptom, but the manager of the centre said that of course the “performance is evaluated”… Now I can understand this is a job that does not bring in profit – but now you need to remember that we are talking of peoples lives – so adding insult to injury and stressing the workers out when the job itself is stressful enough sounds they should hire comrade Stahanov.

At the end of the day, who can your stressed out 112 operator call?

Cliff notes: emergency services in emergency

(Sorry the article didn’t get all there the first time because of the database hiccups.
Hank W.)

Going once, going twice, gone… and there go the jobs in the paper industry. As the global recession dawns upon us there is going to be more and more “pops” when the weasels take our jobs and run away with the money. And what will the politicians do? Build garden cities. Yes, and meanwhile “Finland needs more workers”… sorry, did someone say “a cheap exploitable labor force”? There is always someone out there desperate enough to be brought in to do the job cheaper.

I always contradict people saying there is a “shortage of nurses”. There is no “shortage of nurses”. There is a “shortage of money and tenures” which results in people not wishing to enter the profession which has created an illusion of a shortage of nurses. Finnish polytechnics churn out about 3000 nurses per year – after 5 years maybe 500 remain in the profession. And why is that? The job is hard, the pay lousy and you have only short-term contracts. So instead of making the profession something people want to do – the answer is to bring in people from someplace where the conditions are if possibly worse and they think they are getting a good deal.

There wouldn’t be all these Finnish nurses working for the NHS in the UK or Norway unless it was the same situation – the Finnish nurses think they get a good deal. While on the one hand economically bringing in foreign nurses is a business decision – we wait 10 years. That nurse has either gone back home after saving enough money for a new house and childrens college, or then the nurse has a family here. She wants a better salary and a continuous job contract, but as the culture of exploitation is there – what is the answer? To bring in some other – cheaper nurse working for peanuts and not complaining of actually having to support a family on those wages. So it continues on and on and on without anyone needing to address the core problems of the system itself.

So I would rather say “Finland needs more jobs” – but theres always the patent answer of creating your own. Oh yes, even back in the days of the big recession of the 1990’s the magical answer was for everyone to put up an enterprise and start selling soap and vitamins. Fixed the statistics greatly but how many people selling soap and vitamins to each other do we need? Does the economy of a village run on everyone selling soap and vitamins to each other? Because the fact is that the production industries are outsourcing and if there is no production there is not much money in the economy after a while. Not that there is a lack of the “enterpreneurial spirit” in Finland. Or would this “make money and become rich” spirit. Now as everyone knows one cannot come rich in Finland with honest work. The welfare state has its hand in your pocket. But as the human animal operates on greed we have now had not only one but two pyramid schemes where someone has gotten the great idea of making a fast buck off peoples greed. The WinCapita system allegedly had 10 000 Finns “invest” hundred million euros into the pyramid… that is quite a mind-boggling sum to think of. Another smaller scheme called GPP has just unraveled selling “pension insurance”… So what does *that* say of the country? We do remember Albania had a revolution in the 1997 due to a pyramid scheme taking all the money out of the system – they were probably high up in the “global competitiveness” figures back then – before the weasels popped the bubble.

It is questionable how far Finland could afford to copy the Nordic Welfare State model with its limited resources in the first place. It has worked so far, but even Sweden has been showing a hiccup… Norway has oil and gas to support their regional policies, but Finland just thinks it has resources. The current political parties – the three largest having equal 21% of the vote at the moment cannot come into consensus of what needs to be done – so everyone does something and the direction… The decisions made back during the big recession of the 1990’s was to “liberalize” the economy have now in 15 years resulted in the liberated industries escaping away. You look at the latest survey on the “hi-tech” Finland and its broadband connections. Even if done by Cisco which has its own interests. The government expects private market forces to take care of the infrastructure – and what is the result? Finland is now in 13th place. Really is this the way to go? We are living interesting times as they say in the Chinese proverb. But Finland isn’t as much alone any more – the rest of the EU is to be considered, but is the direction of the EU any clearer? Surely each country is pulling into its own direction – and is the EU not a giant on clay feet?

So what will Finland be like in 5 or 10 years with the global competition? Weasellandia 2018? Scrapped remains of a welfare state turned into a cut-throat globalized capitalist state with huge income gaps and poverty – a polarized society with ghettos with proles the weasels use as a resource pool of easily exploitable cheap labor that can be popped off when not needed?

The only thing your average Finn can do thinking about this is drink cheap alcohol imported from Estonia and look at how the country is going to hell in a handbasket – and that is my positive outlook of the day.

Cliff Notes: Paha maa

The Ministry of Social and Health affairs has plans on making a public registry of licenced healthcare professionals. The registry would be public, on the internet and would have such information as the person’s name, birthdate, qualification and registration number and any restrictions. This kind of information is available already by a phone call, but the ministry suggests that this way the public could easily verify the treatments they get are provided by licenced professionals. The medical staff on the other hand opposes this kind of public registry, and says people won’t choose healthcare professions as a career if there is such a registry. Mainly the nurses are worried of stalkers and such.

So a few months ago, a big chunk of hair fell out of the back of my head and hadn’t immediately grown back. It looks ridiculous and is quite embarrassing. My dermatologist said it was due to stress (best friend dying + lawsuit + Nokia will do that to you) prescribed me some pills to make it grow back – the price of those pills, 197 euros ($301 US) for a 3-month prescription! The doctor said it could take up to a year to grow back.

So where’s my free healthcare!? KELA (state-run healthcare insurance) pays for NONE of this! One of the problems with socialized medicine I guess, they take your money to pay for healthcare but don’t give it back to you if they feel your condition is not important enough. Fortunately I can (barely) afford this medicine, Finland’s poor would just go around looking like freaks I guess.

Here’s another funny thing about KELA – I lost my wallet not too long ago and have yet to get my KELA card (credit cards came within days, state-issued cards take weeks). You’d think that the pharmacist could just find my name in the computer, but they can’t – Even my local video rental can do that!