Swiss Healthcare on a personal note
I. Introduction
This article is aiming at reviewing Swiss health care system. Because I suspect that very likely I wouldn’t be the only one suffered from Swiss healthcare system. I had colleagues who flew back to their country especially for treatment in Covid times because they couldn’t afford the Swiss medical treatment. How did the other PhD students in Switzerland survive though? Especially that mental health of PhD students (or any other employees) is a hidden taboo — — you know it, you don’t talk about it. You still have to deal with it.
What healthcare goal does the Swiss government take? Does it meet its goal in an eye of an end user? If not, where might the problems be?
To answer these questions, we had to start from 2020 February — -when I arrived in Basel to start my PhD in physics in University of Basel.
Within three months of arrival one was asked by law to register in the healthcare system. My monthly net salary after tax was 3244 CHF. Due to my long term insomnia, I knew I needed the prescribed medications — — Bromazepan(sleeping pills), Dulextine(anti-depressent) and tranquilizers, which meant I had to go to the doctors regularly to get prescriptions.
After making some phone calls to the health insurance companies, I finally figured it was the private insurers that we the individuals should choose and I had to choose a subscription that met my needs the most.
So I simply had two choices:
Option one, if I choose the cheapest monthly subscription, which was 350 CHF, I had to go to the doctors and paid all the relevant medical fees until the amount accumulated up to 2500 CHF within a year. After that would I start to be reimbursed — — up to 90%. So if I go to a psychiatrist twice a month and get prescribed, on top of the monthly medical insurance of 350 CHF, I pay each time 250 CHF for the consultation hour plus 60 CHF medications. These amount to 970 CHF per month.
If all went well that I didn’t need to go see any other doctors, then after 3 months seeing a psychiatrist, my total medical payment would be 2910 CHF. And I could start to be reimbursed.
After I was reimbursed, I would pay the monthly insurance of 350 CHF plus 10% of all the psychiatric medical fees. This meant I would pay 412 CHF per month from the fourth month in Switzerland.
Option two, if I choose the most expensive monthly subscription, which was 550 CHF, the annual cumulative amount before I could get reimbursed was 300 CHF. So if I go to a psychiatrist twice a month and get prescribed, I would pay 550+2502+602=1170 CHF for the first month. And from the second month I could get reimbursed, which meant I paid monthly fee of 550 CHF plus 10% of psychiatric medical fees — — in total 612 CHF per month afterwards.
The above listed medical fees are MINIMUM in that I was not sick or I didn’t have accident.
Let’s look at other bills as well — — my apartment was 1050 CHF per month, food and utilities 300 CHF, public transportation 120 CHF. With the Option 1 Scenario, what was left after the beginning of the month was 804 CHF. Option 2? 604 CHF. I am not yet taking into account the housing deposit, which was 3 months of my rent — -3150 CHF.
With such money at the beginning of your start in Switzerland, I was asking the HR financial department at the University to get paid in advance to barely make ends meet.
All I did was praying that everything went right and there wouldn’t be any accident because couldn’t even afford it.
Things of course didn’t go well. The second day of my arrival in Basel, I fell off the floor because of lack of rest, I was asked to work immediately after I landed.
I went to the hospital for inspection, and couldn’t walk properly for 6 months. I needed my psychiatric medications badly because of my panic attack due to workplace bullying and racism issues. A sexual harassment by an Orthopedic physician greatly increased my mental issues.
That was my very adventurous experience, let’s now check if the Swiss Healthcare has reached its goal.
II. Analysis
Federal Office of Public Health FOPH
The overriding aim of the FOPH is to promote and maintain the good health of all people living in Switzerland. On the one hand, it seeks to promote people’s awareness and thereby enable them to take responsibility for their own health.On the other, it wants a general and consistent improvement of everyone’s health through health promotion, disease prevention and health protection campaigns and the curing of illnesses and alleviation of suffering caused by disease and accidents.
The overriding aim did not talk about the coverage of the healthcare, but that ‘all people living in Switzerland’ was in their range of concern — — which meant they already assumed each one had access to the health care.
At this point I fumbled. Let’s just be honest. That was not even their concern.
I don’t know how to continue discussing.
Their first mission seemed to be ‘to promote and maintain the good health of all people living in Switzerland.’
If I had difficulties surviving, what about the other minimum-waged people?
As of 2021, Basel-Stadt started to regulate minimum wage to 21 CHF per hour. With 21 CHF per hour equalizing a full-time position of 40 hours per 20 days a month, it will be 3360 CHF before tax. After tax the minimum monthly wage would be around 2812 CHF. And mine was 3244 CHF. That was not a big difference with 432 CHF.
If these low-incomers happen to have mental issues or other diseases, how could they afford medical treatment? They have low-income deductions automatically issued from the Canton’s office to make sure they have full access to the Swiss health care.
And close-to-low-income PhD students? No chance.
That is the purpose of me writing this article, I applied for health-care waivers but didn’t get approved.
Look at the figures I experienced. I couldn’t afford health care, hence I left Switzerland. But Switzerland is a land that relies very much on expatriate researchers, over 50% of the PhD candidates are from abroad. If the Federal Office of Public Health FOPH do not secure the expatriate researchers by both an affordable good health care and qualified doctors with working ethics — — — -in the post-pandemic times where health becomes increasingly critical, Switzerland could lose its competitive academia workforce greatly. I am just saying.
