I am British but live in Finland. The Finnish health service is a lot more complex. I'm not really able to make a distinction on better or worse because thankfully my exposure to both has been pretty minimal, although, I'll end with an anecodote that illustrates that it's not easy to compare.
The private sector in Finland is, compartively, huge. Like, imagine a normal shopping centre and two of the bigger units are private, nationwide doctors surgeries. This is pretty much any larger shopping centre in a reasonably sized town here. The reason is that employers are mandated to provide some kind of health insurance to employees. It is this health insurance that is then responsible for giving you a sick note or ensuring that workplace injuries are taken care of - not the public service. The legal minimum is pretty low, so you can't go to them like a GP in the UK and be guaranteed that they'll do anything if it's not covered by the contract with your employer. Now, employers are free to top this up, so 'yeah the pay's comparable but the healthcare is much better' is a common point of disussion in social groups. In my personal case, which is not that special, it's great! I can book an appointment for basically _now_ (Sunday afternoon) online and go get whatever I want looked at. If I was dependent on the public system, lol no - just like home pretty much.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that it's very much a two tier system, and I think it was long ago realised that a way for working people to 'skip the queue' was becoming needed, as if these people became ill and stopped working then they wouldn't be paying for the public system (through taxes).
> The reason is that employers are mandated to provide some kind of health insurance to employees
Even many Finns don't understand that this is not correct. Employers are not mandated to provide any kind of general health care. They must take precautions to protect you from work-related health risks. So for IT workers a physiotherapist checking that your are sitting in a good position would probably be enough. In a mine or steel work it would be a bit more. When you get sick and go to your company health care doctor, that is a voluntary part of your employment contract, in no way mandated by law. One explanation given in the public uses to be: Employers don't want to wait for employees to queue in public health care forever, they want then to return to work soon. Even that explanation does not sound very convincing to me. After all the average flu is over in a week if see a doctor and in seven days if you don't. As an employer I would not voluntarily pay significant money for it if I hadn't to for one reason or another.
See also my comment https://hackertimes.com/item?id=37199110 , it's a really weird, historically grown cost-sharing model that cannot be explained by legal obligations.
Fair enough I have learned something. I just remember the concept being introduced in the onboarding and me and the other foreigners finding it a totally, ahem, foreign concept.
I’m not complaining and I’m certain that I wouldn’t see the full cost in my take home pay should the employer remove it, there must be some kind of tax benefits to them, negotiations, etc.
The private sector in Finland is, compartively, huge. Like, imagine a normal shopping centre and two of the bigger units are private, nationwide doctors surgeries. This is pretty much any larger shopping centre in a reasonably sized town here. The reason is that employers are mandated to provide some kind of health insurance to employees. It is this health insurance that is then responsible for giving you a sick note or ensuring that workplace injuries are taken care of - not the public service. The legal minimum is pretty low, so you can't go to them like a GP in the UK and be guaranteed that they'll do anything if it's not covered by the contract with your employer. Now, employers are free to top this up, so 'yeah the pay's comparable but the healthcare is much better' is a common point of disussion in social groups. In my personal case, which is not that special, it's great! I can book an appointment for basically _now_ (Sunday afternoon) online and go get whatever I want looked at. If I was dependent on the public system, lol no - just like home pretty much.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that it's very much a two tier system, and I think it was long ago realised that a way for working people to 'skip the queue' was becoming needed, as if these people became ill and stopped working then they wouldn't be paying for the public system (through taxes).