From Spain.
For someone who’s not self-employed, 15% of his salary is paid to Social Security by the worker and an equivalent amount by the employer. For someone self-employed, we can choose to pay variable amounts based on income, or a fixed estimation (most people’s choice). For someone who’s never worked yet, they’re considered dependants of their parents. You get your SSN on your first paying job (we also have an ID number, which we can get much earlier and which is the same number in our national ID, our driver’s license and our passport, as well as being our tax ID).
How much you get back at retirement is calculated by age of retirement (if you “pre-retire” you get less) and by how much you were paying for the last 15 years. If you get fired, your unemployment “pay” (up to 18 months) is calculated based on your last two years of employment. There are caps both for retirement and unemployment. Unemployed benefits also include access to government-sponsored professional training, from bricklaying to ISO14000 certification.
I can choose my doctor among those available for my health center. In my case, my health center should be in TownOne, but you see, my SiL happens to be a GP in another town within the same region and she’s the GP for the whole family, so I was able to request her on grounds of “that way I have the same GP as my mother, for whom I’m the primary caretaker.” Again, the health center where SiL works is not the one Mom should have (there’s two in town) but she was able to request SiL on grounds of “this way I don’t need to answer the exact same questions from two doctors, you know; after all, if I tell my DiL that I won’t share medical information with her, she’d get angry and rightly so!”
If I get sick during “doctor hours” and can, I go to the office. If it’s off-hours, I go to the ER. If it’s not that urgent, I phone and get an appointment for next day. If the sick person can’t move, a call to Emergencies gets an in-house visit.
The doc’s visits are free. As I’m employed, I pay 40% of my medicines if they’ve been ordered by a SS doctor; Mom, being retired, pays nothing. The maximum price for medicines is set by the government.
Wait times for specialists are longer; there is a triage, so depending on how serious your case is you’ll have a longer or shorter wait. In my case, I spend most of the time abroad, and I’ve never had a problem scheduling specialist visits for times that were comfortable for me.
There is also private practice, but this doesn’t necessarily mean shorter waiting times. The best podologist in my town is booked more than 6 months in advance.
Any procedure that your doctor says is required, is required. Some will need to go to a committee, but generally if your doc says you need it, you do. I got my Lasik from private practice, as it was evidently elective; one of my great-aunts got hers on the public penny, as in her case it was an evident case of going from almost being run over several times because she didn’t see cars to being able to recognize people before they spoke to her. Sex-reassignment surgery, heart surgery, reconstructive surgery (not cosmetic surgery because you don’t like your nose, but in those cases where the need came from an accident), all can be covered. Cancer treatment and transplants are covered. Ob-gyn is covered. Hospital stays are covered.
Dentist care through SS is quite bad and low-level, so most people go to a pay dentist.
There are no “sick days.” If you’re too sick to work, you get “la baja” from a doctor; it indicates when can you go back to work or when do you need new tests to determine whether you can. Most people who are not self-employed or in trades are salaried, so during the baja they still get their salary, just not any pluses they might have. This lasts during several months, in Navarra one year (these benefits are now managed in some cases at the regional level, so the details can change with geography); you later move to getting paid a smaller amount by SS, as “temporary disability”. After two years you go to a “medical jury” who decides whether to keep you on “temporary” or move you to “permanent disability,” which can be “partial” (for example, “this person can’t do heavy lifting but can do light work”).