Healthcare in Japan compared to other countries?

15 comments

1. I’ve always had good quality healthcare when I’ve needed it. I have no complaints. The insurance system here is much better than what I had when I lived in the US.

2. I come from South Korea where the healthcare is one of the best in the world. I’ve only been in Japan for several months so far but I feel Japan is as good as Korea.

3. Not sure what procedure(s) you need, but you might want to look into the price delta between being treated in Japan vs somewhere like south korea, thailand or taiwan. ZipAir has super cheap flights and is a subsidiary of JAL, so it’s not a ghetto low priced carrier like we have in the US. I did the 12 hour from LAX to Tokyo as well as 7 hours from Tokyo to Bangkok and both were very clean and professional. You can even preorder a huge box of banana kitkats??? Very Japanese. Anyway, even with the weaker yen you can still save yourself an enormous amount of money by shopping around a bit.

4. Depends on what you are getting done. I’ve had good experiences, and when I first did not have health insurance the cost wasn’t s expensive. It’s very cheap with.

5. japans standard should be the benchmark for all countries. scandanavian is advanced level healthcare.

6. Its been like 8 years and I have citizenship so it might be different now but I was visiting my grandma and developed an ear infection. I get them normally but this one was particularly bad and medicines that I could buy at the drug store weren’t working. So I asked her to help me get insurance. Went to the office to sign up and a few hours later, a doctor was looking at my ear telling me that this must be hurting.

   Got some medication and went back to the US a week later.

   It was the easiest thing I have ever encountered regarding healthcare.

7. a downside to health care in Japan,

   it takes a long time for new drugs or medical equipment to made available to patients due to their process of evaluation. It is years behind FDA approvals.

8. I only ever had great experiences personally, professional service and a fee that was surprisingly low every time. What I also loved was the general ease of access. I just walked into the clinic and got seen within an hour or two. Even if I was a new patient, just walking in off the street was fine.

   A couple of bad points I can think of:

   * Doctors aren’t always required to keep up with new developments, and sometimes don’t listen to the patient. Be ready to go to a different clinic if you don’t like your doctor.
   * The hospitals are great, but actually getting into one can be a challenge. If you are picked up by an ambulance, they phone around to try and find a hospital which can accept you. Sometimes that can take a while. Obviously for life-threatening emergencies that’s probably not a concern.
   * Everything is great on weekdays during business hours. After-hours and weekends, I wouldn’t know what to do.
   * Mental health services are very sparse. An acquaintance of mine was going through what I can only imagine was a psychotic episode got sent home with blood pressure medication.
   * For the love of all that is good pay your health insurance and carry the card on you. I have watched an ambulance drive away from the same woman with a potential concussion because she didn’t have health insurance.

9. I have had surgery done in Japan, but language is the biggest barrier here for someone who doesn’t speak japanese. As such the procedure was done smoothly, I have no complaints but the system I find is little dodgy as I was given an estimate of 75k yen but the final bill was almost double and they said perhaps someone did a mistake, I was completely shocked as If I have to pay that much amount, I could have had a private room instead of sharing one. Also one of the doctors who helped me and took my case in the sense that nurses and doctors do not speak English at all/ very well so he kinda talked to me and set up everything for my surgery except that he was only managing but some other doctors specialized in my problem will be doing the surgery, all is fine until he told me to lie down on the pretext of checkup, and I kind of understood and left after setting the appointment the next time. This time I took my husband with me and he just handed over the papers and the tests and everything was done the regular way as expected. I never met him after my surgery.

10. Yes, I’ve gotten a flight to my home country *three* times related to healthcare or healthcare-adjacent from Japan. The overwhelming reason is language, while for emergencies it’s not usually an option and it has been tricky-to-okay when I had to be treated in Japan, the other times I preferred a doctor or situation where I understood the language wouldn’t get in the way.

    For healthcare-related stuff, both my home country and Japan are cheap enough that money is not an issue (aham not from the USA), so I preferred paying a bit more for the best quality and service I can personally get, these were all (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime things. On one where I was vulnerable for few weeks afterwards, it also helped that I was there with family and single in Japan at the time.

11. When I first came to Japan one of my coworkers complained of stomach pain. She went to three different doctors here who all said she just had the flu, gave her some antibiotics, and sent her on her way. A few weeks later she went back to her home country, and the first doctor she saw diagnosed her with pancreatic cancer and was shocked that the other doctors didn’t recognize it immediately.

    I have a friend who, a few years ago, developed a growth on his neck. He saw a few doctors here who wrote it off as an infection that would go away, but he kept getting other opinions until he finally got a doctor who diagnosed it as a tumor which needed to be treated properly.

    …If you suspect you might have something serious, but the prognosis is otherwise, always get a second opinion. Or a third. Or a fourth. Or one outside of the country.

12. So good

13. I’ll preface this by saying Japan is huge and that I know it varies via prefecture. There are good and bad hospitals, and probably the bigger the city the better the hospitals are.

    But my experience is that they aren’t very good at dealing with more complex cases. Certain illnesses I had I had to ask at every hospital in my prefecture only to be told that none of them dealt with it and I had to seek treatment in the nearest major city. And even then the Doctor treating my illness didn’t do much.

    For less complex cases it’s pretty good.

14. Japanese health care is now better than Canada’s. It is not that healthcare in Japan has gotten better; rather, it is that healthcare in Canada has significantly deteriorated. You can usually see a specialist in Japan the same morning, but in Canada, it will take months.

15. Reposting what I wrote a few days ago on another subreddit:

    Ask anyone who has spent a lot of time with the medical systems of Europe and Japan and they’ll tell you that the quality of care in Japan can be questionable, especially if it’s been for mental healthcare. If you’re coming from the US, it’s a step up, but with some caveats:

    How many other countries have actual medical doctors regularly offering full-on quackery like TCM (kampo) for healthcare? (“In October 2000, a nationwide study reported that 72% of registered physicians prescribe Kampō medicines”)

    Women’s clinics in Japan are pretty awful too. Ask someone who has ever needed to get Plan B what their experience with the doctor was like. Prenatal care also has some wild standards about how much weight you can or should gain during pregnancy. Gender affirming care is entirely non-existent, and care for people with developmental disorders or disabilities is also pretty bad.

    I guess what I’m getting at with Japan being “behind” is that if you primarily have health issues that affect majority groups across the board and where most changes over the last 20-30 years have been small iterative improvements, you’ll experience great care, especially relative to the US. But if you experience a health issue where medical consensus has changed on pretty significantly over the last 20-30 years, you will have a rough time.

    Japan has incredibly good survival rates for cancer, good longevity, and does very well at post-natal care, but it’s also a country where the consensus among medical professionals is that adults can’t have ADHD (which studies have shown is wrong for more than 20 years) and where being Deaf means not being able to access nearly all of society.