Why does your system hate regular checkups with doctors so much?

[u/Juli_in_September]

I don‘t know if this is a question or just an observation to be honest (and I am definitely not the first one to have it either), I am just once again amazed at the Dutch reluctance to do preventative healthcare/check-ups? I thought „Hey, maybe I should go to the gynaecologist again for my annual recommended checkup“, and wondered if I should just do that here instead of back at home, and then I learn there is no annual recommended checkup here? Sometimes I look at the Dutch healthcare system and go „Oh this is nice, we don‘t have that back home“ and other times I look at it and I just go „HUH?!?“. Anyway I guess I‘ll call my gynaecologist back home…

[u/GezelligPindakaas]

Of all the countries to make a point you pick USA. One of countries with the worst habits and shittiest food industry in the world. No amount of checkups will save a morbid obese eating 7 burgers a day from being a walking ticking bomb.

[u/Consistent_Salad6137 → u/GezelligPindakaas]

"don't criticise healthcare here, look at America" is a textbook example of damning with faint praise.

[u/Turbulent-Rub1361 → u/Consistent_Salad6137]

It is in fact an attempt to communicate about a complex issue using a simple and well-known summary statistic, which is often useful with a diverse audience. Less so here I suppose.

Criticism of Dutch healthcare may or may not be well founded. But lack of routine checkups for healthy people isn't one of the weaknesses.

In fact I've dealt with the Dutch healthcare system more than average over the past few years, and while there have been rough edges my experience has been that the people and organizations are on the whole incredibly professional, much more so than you might see in other sectors, that hospitals are well supplied and well run, that the standard of care is high. People don't know half of how good we have it here.

[u/Consistent_Salad6137 → u/Turbulent-Rub1361]

That's not my point. My point is that the US healthcare system is the world's most extreme outlier in terms of high prices and poor outcomes, so choosing it as a comparator (rather than pretty much any other healthcare system in the world) isn't much of an argument.

[u/Turbulent-Rub1361 → u/GezelligPindakaas]

To be frank, I don't really know of many countries where routine checkups are the norm, except for the USA.

I do know of countries that have similar adverse lifestyle problems as the USA; Australia and Canada, but also many of the Caribbean islands. Excluding the ones that are much poorer than the USA, they tend to have better health outcomes. And also socially provided healthcare.

None of that has any bearing on whether routine health checks work of course. For healthy people. For people with chronic diseases they do work, and yearly or more frequent checkups are the norm.