Summary: Experiencing Socialized Medicine in an Actual Socialist Country

I rarely get sick. Maybe once every couple of years I might feel poorly enough to take a day or two off work. The number of times I’ve been to the doctor due to feeling bad or with an urgent concern could be counted on a single hand.

But I got sick in the DDR. I don’t recall the details of my symptoms, but it must have been pretty bad to motivate me to undertake the challenge of going to the doctor in a foreign country.

I can’t remember, but I assume the physician was associated with the university. The office was old and drab, like something out of a ’50s movie scene, and the equipment wasn’t shiny or state of the art.

I recall the doctor was a woman: efficient and no-nonsense. After checking various vitals and asking me a few questions, she wrote up a prescription. It was on a paper receipt, and like the cliché, the handwriting was scribbled and completely unintelligible to me.

Having no clue about what I was to get or where to go, I think I asked the doctor’s receptionist where I should go next. She brusquely said any pharmacy, and pointed me in the direction of the nearest one.

I walked in and waited my turn. When I passed my handwritten prescription to the pharmacist, I watched with growing concern as they fetched more and more items. A dozen tablets, four brown bottles of some unknown liquid, maybe something further.

I tried to remember how many East German marks I had on me. Had I brought enough money for this?

After a small cafeteria tray’s worth of items were presented to me, the pharmacist turned away and called the next customer.

“Um, how much does this cost?” I asked. “Nothing,” came the flat, perfunctory response.

I felt conflicted. Surely I needed to pay something. So I asked to buy some facial tissues. The total cost to me was probably less than 25 cents US.

Mine was just a brief, minor experience. Yes, the technology and facilities may have been antiquated, but they were available to everybody. I had to pay nothing, and I was not even a citizen of the country.

I know of rural regions of the U.S. that would be happy to have any facilities, even those from the DDR 30+ years ago.

I’ve often thought back to that experience in subsequent years. When discussions turn into heated debates over the pros and cons of “socialized medicine” versus the for-profit US healthcare system, I am often amused when people fervently tell me of the ills and horrors of socialized medicine.

I find the most emphatic and impassioned arguments against any centralized or government-run healthcare system often come from people who have never been abroad, much less to an actual socialist country. Of the few that have travelled abroad, most of them have typically never received medical care in any Western European or Asian country.

Decades before heated debates over “Obamacare,” I would sometimes quip that I’d take the DDR healthcare system of a 30 years ago over the present-day US system. The latter, though state-of-the-art, is unavailable to far too many citizens, and bankrupts those who have the audacity to get seriously ill.

It is fascinating to me to see how discussions of single payer, Medicare-for-all, and other potential healthcare and insurance plans have transformed from complete political non-starters to accepted and promoted planks of many mainstream candidates.

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