Comment by necovek
4 days ago
In theory, Serbian public healthcare system is available to everyone, but in practice, wait times are extremely long (you might wait 6 months for an MRI for a suspected cancer by a specialist; specialists are booked a year in advance sometimes, though GPs are pretty available).
The way system (and patients) survive is by relying on "connections": someone you know gets you to "jump the line" (it could be a nurse or a doctor or even a janitor at the same hospital you want to get a specialist to see you).
It ends up being similarly "fair" (iow, not), but at the very least, everybody will prioritize kids and young adults (though in children's hospitals, same pattern is present).
Private healthcare is reasonably accessible, but best experts are with public healthecare institutions (uni clinics) or when working externally, booked 3-6 months in advance.
> by relying on "connections"
That's just corruption. That's not equitable. In the UK that would be criminal and there's pretty much no way to game the system. That doesn't mean there aren't queues, but nobody gets a preference.
Indeed, however it is big part of the culture and people do not see it as such (when people complain about corruption here, I just ask them if they've done something like this in the past, and they shut up or say how everyone does it — for those of us who feel internal shame even thinking of doing this, we get left behind).
But I did hear good things about UK public health system as being one of the best working public healthcare systems, even if no system is perfect.