The $3 doctor visit

I spent all last weekend cooped up in my apartment, sucking down medicine and running through boxes of Kleenexes, trying to recover from a cold before Monday arrived. I was unsuccessful. So Monday morning, I went into work (I don't have a phone and the school is only two blocks away) to tell my coteacher that I probably shouldn't be around 100+ third graders while I have a cold. That was fine and everything, "just make sure to go see a doctor" she casually mentioned as I was about to leave. "Umm... do I have to? I'd really rather not spend that kind of money" I responded. She looked really confused. "Don't be silly, it's not that expensive" she says before walking into the classroom to begin the first class. So I head back home, not really sure what her definition of 'not that expensive' is, but slightly annoyed that I'm going to have to drop, I assume, at least 40 bucks on a doctor's visit.

But I'm letting you know now so I guess I kind of ruined it

I go to the doctor's office nearest my apartment and check in with the receptionist. I'm not really sure how the Korean healthcare system works and am wondering if there's going to be a bunch of papers to fill out and phone calls to be made before I'm actually able to see the doctor. Nope, just my Korean ID and she tells me to have a seat. The facility is nice and even has a flat screen television in the waiting room with a Korean soap opera showing. I can't make out what they're saying, but do you really need to understand the dialogue of a soap opera to be able to figure out what's going on? After just a few minutes of waiting, the doctor calls me in. It's a quick visit but he makes his diagnosis, writes a prescription for me, and has me sit in a room and breath this vapor in through my nose and out through my mouth. I go back out the receptionist, feeling that anxiousness that you get when you have no idea how much you're about to pay for something. 3,000 won she tells me. Wait... that must be missing a zero. 3,000 won is about $3USD. I ask her if she's certain. "Yes" she tells me, "3,000 won." I then go down to the pharmacy to get my prescription filled. "Okay, this must be where they get you. Cheap doctor's visit but then they charge a ton for the medicine. Like printers and ink." Wrong again. Six bucks for a bottle of Nasonex that normally runs $30-40 in the US.

"What in the world is going on?!" I ask myself. How was I able to go to a nice doctor's office, with English speaking staff, get treated quickly, and have a prescription filled all for less than ten dollars? I'm confused, skeptical, and extremely curious about how this works so I go into research mode when I get home. I discover that Korea has a single-payer healthcare system. A single-payer system which spends less than a quarter of what the US does per capita and produces better results (higher longevity and lower infant mortality rates).

Okay, so citizens must pay a ton of taxes for this super-nice, uber-cheap system, right?

Nope, employees pay 2.5% of their salary to the National Health Institute Corporation and the employer contributes another 2.5%. That means that an average Korean making $35K a year will pay $73 a month to the NHIC. Then, depending on the type of visit, the patient will pay somewhere between 10 and 30% of the treatment costs to the doctor, with a $2,000 cap on annual individual expenses (ie. the patient will never have to pay more than $2,000 in one year for treatment costs).

So doctors must not make very much money then, right?

This is actually kind of true. Doctors in Korea make about half of what a doctor in Europe or the US would make, but, by all accounts, they're still doing okay. In fact, the doctor's union has openly stated that they do not push very hard for price increases when negotiating with the NHIC because it would be "shameful for doctors to ask for more money when our profession is already one of the highest-earning in the country."

How about quality? Surely they have to sacrifice on quality, right? 

The fact is that, yes, there are many expensive treatments that the NHIC does not pay for. As much as people hate to hear the words 'rationing' and 'healthcare' in the same sentence, the truth is that every healthcare system, including privatized ones, must figure out a way to ration treatment. Even if there were enough doctors, nurses, medicine, etc. to treat everyone, a healthcare system which did so would immediately go bankrupt. So the NHIC has spent a lot of time studying different methods and have determined that there are many tests, treatments, and operations which are extraordinarily expensive and don't produce impressive enough results to justify the price tag. And they seem to be doing a great job; the Korean healthcare system has been ranked 8th most efficient in the world.

None of this in Korea

Doctors don't earn as much and the NHIC doesn't cover many expensive operations, but surely that's not enough to account for all of the savings, right? 

You are right indeed, my italicized friend; the vast majority of the healthcare savings can be attributed to the fact that it's a single-payer system. This cuts down enormously on administrative costs and, most importantly, it makes the healthcare system nonprofit, eliminating billions of dollars of profits which would be made in a privatized system.

One of the great things about the US is that we're usually open to importing good ideas from abroad. We may not come up with all of the great ideas, but we have historically been quick to adopt them and make them our own. "Hey, these French Enlightenment guys know what's up, we should use some of their ideas in our constitution." "Those Brits with all of their factories seem to be making a lot of money, maybe we should try that." And, most importantly: "That pizza stuff they got over in Italy is pret-tee delicious. We should try to make some of that here." But, for political reasons (or to take it one step closer to the root, monetary reasons) a lot of money has been pumped into fear-mongering about universal healthcare systems and the truth has been obscured from the American people. All you really have to do is look at the data, and in this case, the data is extremely clear: of the top 50 healthcare systems in the world, 49 of them have universal coverage. We are the only country that doesn't and we're ranked 38th, while spending way more than any other country. Hopefully one day, Americans will realize that universal health coverage is just as good of an idea as pepperoni pizza and that maybe we should think about importing it as well.

The Cheonan World Dance Festival

First off, I want to explain why this post is going to be a little different than my normal ones. In an effort to promote their event, the Cheonan World Dance Festival paid several foreign bloggers to attend the event and then write about their experience. That's why this post is going to be a little bit longer and a little bit heavier on the details than my normal ones. I want everyone to know, however, that the dance festival made no demand that my post portray the event in a positive light. I'm not selling out, this is not an advertisement for the event, and I'm going to be honest about everything. Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's do this.

Cheonan World Dance Festival

As my taxi pulls up to Samgeori Park, the location of the Cheonan World Dance Festival 2013, the driver, who somehow still didn't quite understand that I don't speak Korean even after I dropped 5 hanguko motaeyos ("I don't speak Korean") on him, says something that I assume is along the lines of "enjoy the festival!" Or maybe it was, "thanks for letting me rip you off by driving 10 blocks out of the way before I finally went to the park." I prefer to believe it was the former though.

I walk into the park and my first impression is how beautiful the setting is. Samgeori Park also appears to be a botanical garden with thousands of flowers, sculpted bushes, and a couple of little ponds. As I walk through an area of pink and yellow flowers, I can hear rock music blaring in the distance and am struck by the contrast. But the good kind of contrast, like finding out that that cute girl in the sundress likes to put Led Zeppelin on while she does her makeup. As the sun beams down on me, I walk over a hill and see the main stage. I'm so relieved to see that it's covered, as it's going to be my home for the next 6 hours and I forgot to bring sunblock. No sunburned gringo, er, waygook today!

Flower sculpture!

The main stage

I have about 40 minutes until the Traditional Folk Dance Competition begins so I decide to get a lay of the land. There's a football-field-sized tent located near the main stage so I decide to go inside and check it out. Holy cow, jack pot. The first thing I see are two enormous screens showing a soccer game with about 100 people seated below them watching. "Oh cool," I think, "people can come check up on their team." But wait a second, those soccer players aren't real... It's a video game! All of these people are watching two people battle it out on FIFA 2013. And there are even announcers commentating too! I look to my right and see a computer pit with about 50 teenagers and 20-somethings sitting in front of computers, all playing FIFA. There's another pit with people playing League of Legends. And 2 other pits with people playing other games. It turns out that Cheonan Dance Festival doubles as a qualifier for the National Electronic Games. An interesting coupling of the physical and the furthest-from-physical-as-possible. I was fascinated, to say the least, about the whole thing and was only able to pull myself away when I realized that the Folk Dance Competition was about to begin.

Koreans take their electronic gaming seriously

Complete with commentators

I go back to the main stage and take my seat just in time for the competition to begin. The Folk Dance Competition took place over 4 days and featured 24 teams from 20 different countries, including powerhouses like France, India, Mexico, Turkey and Indonesia, regional-hometown favorites like Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan, and even a couple from completely unknown-to-me places like Bashkortostan and Buryatia (turns out they're both republics within Russia, however that works). On Saturday, the day that I attended, the 8 teams performing were: Poland, Korea, Malaysia, India, Buryatia, Japan, Taiwan, and Turkey. I'll save you a lengthy description of each performance, but suffice it to say that the whole thing was really cool. The dancers were great and it was interesting to see how the aspects of each culture came through in their style of dance. Korea and Japan were very disciplined with every dancer performing every movement perfectly in unison. Poland was pretty bland and boring. India was weird yet mesmerizing. Buryatia (in Russia, near Mongolia) appeared pissed off at their own existence. And Taiwan, I thought was China until I looked back at the program.

The Korean group moving in perfect unison

My personal favorite - The group from India

Buryatia, looking like they're about to invade and enslave the audience

Next on the program was the Talent Competition, but it didn't come on for another hour so I decided to meander around some more. In my meandering, I found what might have been my favorite part of the whole thing: a world culture section. It had museum-like exhibits from different regions of the world (which, by the way, featured Costa Rica reppin Latin America) as well as a food court with food and beverage from Russia, Turkey, Mexico, Kenya, India, France, and Ecuador. I was thrilled. I got myself a gyro from the Turkey stand and a bratwurst and a beer from the Germany stand and wandered around chowing down on my delicious multicultural meal.

When the lady working the exhibit saw me taking this picture she 

asked me, "Would you like to know a little about Costa Rica?"

In the US, 'talent show' usually means some singers, some dancers, a couple of magicians, and maybe a guy who can make his stomach look like Danny DeVito. In Korea, 'talent show' apparently means "let's all go up there and sing nothing but ballads like the love of our lives are in the audience and we have this one song to convince them to come back to us." This might have been enjoyable were I a 15 year old on a date with his 14 year old girlfriend, but, alas, I am not and I was not. The only real noteworthy part of the talent competition was the rapper who I got to watch warm-up, but, unfortunately, didn't get to see perform because I had to catch my train. During warm-up, he performed an English song but felt that it was sufficient to just spit random English words instead of actually learning the lyrics. One of his sequences went as follows: "now pick up the bush man, putting sugar on the leg, take it to the dog, and close the bus down." Now that I'm looking at the lyrics, maybe he's just really poetic, like a Korean Bob Dylan. Another thing I found interesting about the rapper was that, when he performed his Korean song, he used the honorific verb tense, used when speaking to an elder or superior. I didn't actually understand the lyrics but picked up on the 'nida', 'sida' 'nim' and 'seyo' of the honorific tense. In my mind, I imagined his lyrics went something like, "yo respectable girl, come over here and back that honorable booty up on this humble playa."

Looking past the terrible talent show that ended the night, the Cheonan World Dance Festival was, all in all, a really enjoyable event. By far the best thing it has going for it is its embrace of multiculturalism. In a country that has traditionally prided itself on being one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world and has a reputation of hostility towards diversity, it's really cool to see a multicultural event thriving. As an RPCV, it's probably no surprise to you that I believe cultural exchange is important. In an increasingly globalized world, it's important that we understand cultural differences while also recognizing that behind the different clothes, food, and dancing styles, we're all still humans who have the same basic needs and desires. The Cheonan World Dance Festival is doing its part to facilitate that understanding and, for that, it should be given a standing ovation.