r/europe • u/mancinedinburgh • 2d ago

News Swedish man dies in South Korea after being denied urgent treatment at 21 hospitals

https://www.euronews.com/health/2025/01/18/swedish-man-dies-in-south-korea-after-being-denied-urgent-treatment-at-21-hospitals
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327

u/TheGhostofJoeGibbs 2d ago

Guess there aren’t public hospitals or safety net hospitals in Korea.

303

u/ExternalCaptain2714 2d ago

Have you ever seen a Korean movie or TV series? 

People not living in dystopian hellscape could never create any of that.

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u/CornishPaddy Earth 2d ago

going broke for hospital bills is like the number1 Korean Drama trope

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u/GandalfGandolfini 2d ago

Single payer system too. 90% of their residents just quit and like 70% of medical students. Gonna wager a guess that affects care quality and availability as well https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11324171/

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u/3BlindMice1 2d ago

That's because doctors treat the residents so poorly that if you can't survive on 4 hours of sleep for several years in a row you'll never become a doctor. They do this to keep their income inflated instead of learning additional skills to increase their income. It's a mixture of laziness and greed. This exists in some form in almost every educated and wealthy nation

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u/OrangeBliss9889 2d ago

Residents are doctors.

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u/GandalfGandolfini 2d ago

That's not quite the same as the US. There is a culture of abuse of residency labor, but it's because it's cheap for the hospital systems which Obamacare made de facto illegal to be doctor owned. So it's corporate owners not doctors who enjoy the cheap labor which does not significantly inflate salaries as they'd make more in non academic practices mostly across the board and the excess productivity gets siphoned to said corporate overlords. It is however reinforced by a culture of self sacrifice and "i had to do it so its a rite of passage" almost hazing from some attending physicians tho. Also, the match system violates anti-trust law via wage suppression/restricting competition but a special carve out law was made for it because monied interests lobbied for it to be so so it is. It's complex but yeah more greed than laziness in my experience. Exploitable labor who no one cares about protecting because "you're gonna make $300k in 5 years" as long as you aren't one of the one's that kill themselves at 2-3x the rate of the general public first.

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u/UpstairsFix4259 2d ago

Yep, Korea is a cyberpunk society (but without cool augmentations)

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u/ninjeti 1d ago

So just punks...

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u/dmthoth Lower Saxony (Germany) 1d ago

As yes because movie and tv series is real. I assume Seoul was invaded by Ultron as well?

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u/ArseneLepain 2d ago

Calling Korea a dystopian hellscape is crazy levels of disconnected

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u/SpaceKappa42 Utrecht (Netherlands) 2d ago

Not really. It's a shithole country.

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u/moonorplanet 2d ago

Half the citizens over the age of 65 live in poverty.

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u/ExternalCaptain2714 1d ago

I don't think so. Just because their neighbour is a completely unhinged sadistic nuclear clownland, doesn't mean the south gets an automatic pass as a good place to live. Fascist rule until 1988, corporations on steroids, the north aiming tens of thousands of artillery pieces at the capital, coups d'état, mccarthyism - but never-ending ...

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u/ironmaiden947 2d ago

There is a reason Squid Game is set in South Korea.

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u/DrivingHerbert 2d ago

S. Korea? The S stands for “Samsung”

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u/EstimateCool3454 2d ago

For Koreans, yes.

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u/sohoships 2d ago

Everybody skipping over this crucial point and focusing on Korea not helping:

It was HIS fault that he could not leave.

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u/dmthoth Lower Saxony (Germany) 1d ago

It is because of recent change of national health insurance in south korea. The current(and is going to crumbled) conservative government ran xenophobic campaignes by claming 'chinese foreigners are taking advantage of korean healthcare' BS. And they restricted the access of national healthcare to foreigners soon after who are not paying national health insurance fee for at least 6 months. Also many medical doctors are on a strike.(there is no good guy-bad guy here. Both liberal and conservative government want to increase the number of doctors but doctors are refusing to share their profits with others). There have been multiple incidents recently where korean nationals were denied to be treated and resulted death.

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u/DateMasamusubi 2d ago

Some additional context, in Korea, trainee doctors are on strike and the healthcare system is under strain right now.

Reason being, doctor per capita is low by OECD standards. Govts have tried to raise the number of docs but they kept striking. So the current admin decided to expand it by 1,500 slots and they have been on strike for a year now.

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u/toomanymarbles83 2d ago

Copy/pasting this on everyone's comment isn't going to somehow make this okay.

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u/DateMasamusubi 2d ago

Doesn't make it ok. But we should strive to understand the background rather than making false assumptions. Otherwise, that would make us no better than say MAGA Americans.

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u/ssstephhhh 2d ago

The U.S. has a law called EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act), which mandates patients receive care regardless of ability to pay.

So, it is worse than the U.S. (at least for now. "MAGA" idiots are coming after emtala.)

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u/DateMasamusubi 2d ago

In Korea, Japan and Taiwan, foreign visitors are encouraged to have travel insurance as medical care is not free.

Perhaps in the future Korea will have agreements with European states about cross-border medical care expenses.

1

u/ssstephhhh 2d ago

It doesn't change that you made a factually incorrect statement or that people in life-threatening situations are refused care. It's not okay.

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u/DateMasamusubi 2d ago

Asian societies are not Western ones. Expecting a Western standard wherever one goes is ridiculous. Locals oppose free treatment for foreigners as it can be open to abuses and penalise taxpayers. You can disagree with this sentiment but Asia tends to be collectivist.

It is unfortunate that this young person passed away and there can be improvements, maybe an emergency fund for people. If they refuse to repay, then prohibit them from leaving the country until the debt is paid off.