Anytime you find yourself at an open air international hacker festival you are sure to be surrounded by people from all over the world. Being located in the Netherlands, most campers come from somewhere in Europe, though plenty of North Americans and a few South Americans as well as Asians manage to make the trip.
With the mainstream media abuzz with reports about the struggle in the United States to adopt a public health insurance option, I have been wanting to present testimony from regular people who have lived their entire lives in nations with national healthcare or other kinds of healthcare systems. How does it work in their country? What are the problems? How much do the basic things like doctor visits, hospital stays, and so on, cost? I set out to find campers from different countries, to ask them these questions. This is part 1 of what I learned.