Finland's health care system has fallen ill.

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Source Article: The 'dark side' of Finland's famous free health care.

What follows is a summary of the salient points:

Finland's decentralized health care system is often managed by local municipalities with populations ranging from hundreds of thousands of people to fewer than 100. And that decentralized nature is not only very expensive to maintain but also can produce vast disparities in the quality of care. Funding for health care services in each municipality is based on the size of the local taxable population, which can make it more difficult to provide services in remote areas where those services are also more expensive to begin with.

As the country's population ages and birth rates fall, the number of taxpayers paying into the system is diminishing -- while the overall population is living longer and putting greater strain on resources. In 2018, the average single Finn faced a net average tax rate of 30%, compared to 23.8% in the United States.

Finns are having less and less children. People are getting older. So Finland needs more people because it need taxpayers. In the interest of sustainability, either Finland accepts more immigrants or it cuts the cost of medical care by offering fewer services.

Back in 2013, Finland was already lagging behind many other OECD countries in having high rates of unmet needs. At the time, more than 4% of Finnish people reported unmet medical needs due to cost, travel distance or waiting lists -- a proportion significantly higher than in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands.

As funding shrinks for future generations, even more Finns could find their needs unmet. Without reform, the Finnish system could become more unequal, with poor people and those who live in remote areas increasingly excluded from the very system that was designed to serve them -- perhaps something for Sanders to keep in mind, as he mulls the Nordic model's applications in America.

Amazing, isn't it?

Young people have to pay for rich older people.

An issue of demographic transition that every developed country is running or going to run into unless they make themselves an attractive destination to sufficient numbers of immigrants.

Lack of exercise. Those Finns are just getting lazy about raking those leaves!