Dutch healthcare system

When you observe and analyse how the Dutch healthcare system works, you can't help but notice that it operates on principles of eugenics.

Up to 90% of patients are kept by their thuisartsen - G.P.'s - from attending a regular specialist doctor, often being told to go "have a sleep and drink water". Yearly physical check-ups are unheard of and the chances you will go through medical tests before being diagnosed are very low. In fact, the chances are more that you will be dismissed as a hypochondriac. When a 20-year-old Croatian female acquaintance of mine asked to be tested upon having had no menstruation cycles for many months despite being not pregnant, the doctor brushed her off, 'You Eastern Europeans really like getting tested too much!"

In my personal experience, I was refused treatment when after 3 weeks of having a bad cold I start coughing out blood - on the grounds that it's my tough luck that the cold stayed on for so long. I couldn't even get a cough syrup for "it's not good for my teeth".

In another case, I had to be rushed to a hospital's emergency room with an excruciating pain in my stomach - to be examined through a glass wall by the receptionist and told over the PA system that all the doctors are busy and I probably had nothing serious anyway.

Even if you manage to get through the hospital, there are the infamous wachtlijsten - waiting lists - that drive many to seek treatment across the border in Belgium.

It's easy to write this mentality off to the overly practical Calvinist mindset and the influence of Nazi camp doctors during Holland's lengthy German occupation. However, this is how it backfires: millions of people walk around with untreated colds, psoriasis and God knows what else. Visiting your local swimming pool is like a visual lesson on skin diseases and conditions.

The trump card of the long average life expectancy is like all statistics a big lie open to any kind of interpretation. It can be largely credited to the toughness and low-fat low-calorie diet of the generation who lived through the WW2 - a phenomenon observed in other countries too. We can only wait and see if this has been actually passed on to the next Dutch generations.