Sweden still sets hearts racing across Europe. The "Swedish model" might bring up thoughts of a nubile blonde rather than a strong social state, but it is in the latter incarnation that my home country stirs the passions of left-leaning Europeans. Whatever Sweden does must be right, or so reason progressive politicians and Guardian journalists – not to mention scores of Swedes. But beyond this blue-eyed vision lurks a darker reality. Sweden's conservative coalition government has stood still as the financial crisis has engulfed the country. Jobs, social services and healthcare are eroding. The Sweden Democrats – the equivalent of the BNP – are on the rise. The social state is failing. The Swedish dream is no more.Take healthcare. Swedes do not enjoy free public care: it costs to see a GP. That is, if you manage to see one. Queues are long and scandals rack the system. Psychiatric care, the source of many such scandals, has a near-medieval penchant for authoritarianism with few European equivalents. People are locked up for months for not taking medicine, given no therapy, and spat out of the system into despair and destitution. The mentally ill die in wards and in outpatient isolation. And they do not even have charities to turn to because state-run healthcare is supposed to work: this is Sweden, after all.
Those who do enjoy Sweden's second-rate public services are lucky. Undocumented migrants, who lack a "personal number", are barred from day-to-day healthcare. Foreigners do not fit easily into a social system built on the postwar notion of the folkhem, or people's home, whose rightful inhabitants are the native Swedes. Despite the xenophobic right's lack of electoral success, Sweden is divided between those inside the system and those outside it – including the asylum seekers now deported en masse to Iraq. But migrants should be happy to be here. This is Sweden, after all.
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Tuesday, July 07, 2009
The Swedish Model Is Failing
Sweden is often held up as the model of the Socialist state that works.
Not really true.
The Swedish Model is alive and well throughout Scandinavia, in one iteration or another.
ReplyDeleteThe reason people work is to pay the unbelievable taxes required to make this kind of system work. And, of course, the percentage of residents who work for the government is sky-high as a result.
Not to mention the fact that cradle-to-grave support inhibits people from thinking for themselves, having entrepreneurial spirits, inventing new products and ideas, etc.
I pray this system never comes to the United States of America, but President O'Bummer worries me.
The main scientist in 'Demographic Winter' starts out with "There's the Swedish model...Not much can be said for the Swedish model." Then he shakes his head and stares at the ground.
ReplyDelete