Both National Guards had been sworn in just 24 hours prior.

She gave birth in a very nice but very small facility so it is plausible that they put pressure on her for billing purposes.

That was not the case with my sister. She has pretty good insurance and had really good care. She ended up making a phone call an hour or two after her premature baby was born to add her to the policy because her now uninsured baby was in the NICU.

There was an art museum that I went to, I think in Cologne that had prints of basically all the paintings. If you really liked one, you could get a high quality print, photo, postcard, etc.

I love not having to drive anymore. Public transit is sometimes a little longer than driving but it’s so low stress and if you do have to drive, the massive public transit infrastructure helps alleviate traffic on the roads and thus speeds things up. Win/win. I realize it’s not for everyone but for me it’s a huge reduction in stress, anxiety, and the extra walking was a contributing factor to losing 25 lbs in my first year here.

I hate that government stuff is painfully slow here. I lived in one of the big cities before I got a job. I booked an appointment with the immigration office in the middle of January and the earliest they could see me was mid July. 2 Months after my visa expired. It took 2 months to get an appointment for my german driver’s license. We’re in a smaller city now and it seems a lot faster but I haven’t been here long enough to get a good idea of how much faster it is for everything.

Something that I really miss is mexican food. If you are from an area of the US with good mexican food, you’ll be missing out on that here. There are some decent taco places around but otherwise I think most “mexican restaurants” here have just seen pictures of mexican food and guessed how to make it. But Döner is awesome and everywhere, so I suppose I traded Burritos for Döner.

Not always. We have a private insurance plan that is reimbursement on certain things. Public option plans for example, the insurance providers are billed directly by the health care provider.

I’m no stranger to the bureaucratic paperwork nightmares of Germany but this hasn’t really applied to us with healthcare related stuff. Wait times at walk-in clinics has been relatively short and the care has been thorough and good. We have more coverage, prescriptions and overall out of pocket expenses are way cheaper. We are getting older and my wife was having some anxiety about her health so I told her get all the testing you want, we’ll submit it all for reimbursement and just pay out of pocket for what they wont cover. She got a full physical, blood/stool/urine work, and a full body ultrasound. All of it was reimbursed(we are on private insurance, but we go to facilities that also provide care for public insurance). That’s just a bit about my limited experience in Frankfurt but overall we have been much happier with it.

Agreed. Wife and I have been in Germany for a year and a half and we love it. When we were unemployed and taking language courses, health insurance was 100€ per month for both of us. And our coverage was way better than our mid tier insurance in the US at $600 a month.