Sickly

We spent yesterday with Pete and Karen, who we had met on our river cruise in Austria in 2024. Super nice couple, have travelled quite a bit but always lived here in Melbourne. Two mildly interesting things about Aus life:

1. They both have private health insurance, something like $200/month, on top of the public system. Everyone who can afford it (they seem to be middle class) does. The public system is OK, but you tend to have to wait too much; with their coverage they would expect to get pretty much anything they need within a day or two. If they had a major issue like needing emergency open heart surgery, they would likely still use the private system, but, the public one would probably work fine and move you to the front of the line as required. This is more or less exactly how everyone I know in Europe and Latin America describes their relationship with health care.

2. They get a government pension, and nothing else. Richer people might have more savings, obviously, but typically, that's what a retired Australian does. This is also how I vaguely believe that Europe works - there is normally a single pension, it's run by the state, and, it's enough to live a normal life.

Although gas prices have not changed too much that we have noticed, they said they are up 50% since the Iran war, which implies that they were a bit lower than Canada, or at least BC, before (right now they are around $2.20).