Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
List of OECD countries by hospital beds (wikipedia.org)
33 points by hydroreadsstuff on March 10, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



Poland is up there at the top with 6.6, except we have no medical staff to man them. All capable doctors moved to the west, leaving hospitals chronically understaffed.


Pretty similar situation in Russia, №3 in the list.

And there is also the fact that larger cities, like Moscow and SPB, have a deficit of beds, while smaller towns have a surplus. Most hospitals were planned and built in the USSR, and a large part of the the population has moved into cities since then, leaving the whole system unbalanced.


same in Hungary


This paper tries to compare the number of ICU beds by country. Unfortunately there is wide variation in the definition of ICU beds from country to country. But what you realize is there are barely any ICU beds per capita to go around during something like a coronavirus outbreak where respiratory assistance is needed.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551445/


How does japan pay for so many hospital beds? They have almost 5x what we have


It does so by running a substantial government budget deficit (~3-4%).

Japan has not had a surplus since the early 90's and it seems unlikely it will generate one this decade [1], challenging traditional economic wisdom on the consequences of financing your country by printing money (the Japanese central bank is key buyer of government issued bonds).

As a result, Japan has the highest government debt level in the developed word, well over 200% of GDP [2].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-fiscal/japa...

[2] https://commodity.com/debt-clock/japan/


Germany is also on the top 5 and we pay about 40-60 percent of our income to the state and the employer pays another ~20% on top. I pay about 7% of my income for the health insurance and my employer pays another 7% on top. I'm sure in Japan it will be similar.


Yeah that's right. up to ~700 Euros per month for the public health care system. If you earn ~60k or more, you can opt out and get a private plan for less money with other perks. But, overall German's pay ca. 7% (you) +7% (employer) into health care.


national healthcare system that doesn't send 10% of the GDP to the insurance industry

although the state of the UK seems to suggest that this is a necessary rather than sufficient condition.


New Zealand has a national healthcare system and has less beds than the US according to this Wiki.

As others have pointed out, I suspect the way beds are counted is key.

ICUs often have step down units and high dependency units and so on. The way these are counted is going to matter.


It is troubling how it correlates with COVID-19 death rate.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: