Is it such a great achievement? What do you mean by 'free'? The doctors don't work without pay. It's just that the patient doesn't pay them, they're paid out of the public budget. The public budget comes from these same patients. Treatment isn't free, it's just depersonalized. If the cost of it were left with the patient, he'd turn the ten rubles over and over in his hands. But when he really needed help he'd come to the doctor five times over. . . .
Is it better the way it is now? You'd pay anything for careful and sympathetic attention from the doctor, but everywhere there's a schedule, a quota the doctors have to meet; next! . . . And what do patients come for? For a certificate to be absent from work, for sick leave, for certification for invalids' pensions: and the doctor's job is to catch the frauds. Doctor and patient as enemies—is that medicine?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, quoted by Milton Friedman. I added the links just for fun, and partly out of a sense of vengefulness toward the UK's National Health Service, which didn't see fit to let me visit a doctor last time I was in the UK, and suffering from some bronchitis / walking pnuemonia type of thing. They had a shortage of doctors for some reason and I didn't rate...
A common mistake made by many people reading Kafka is that they think he's writing psychological drama, rather than scathing political philosophy. Kafka was a government-employed insurance bureaucrat whose job it was to adjudicate insurance claims, including sorting out fraudulent claims from valid ones. Some have argued that his theme of bureaucratic nightmares may have contained autobiographical elements.
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