A biogas facility in Denmark

Denmark is known for being a world leader in wind electricity. But there’s so much more to the country’s renewable energy sector that deserves attention.

A recent package of targets passed by the Danish parliament illustrates why diversity is key to a strong clean energy policy.

This week, lawmakers in Denmark agreed upon a new set promotion programs for efficiency and renewable energy that will put the country on a path to getting 100% of electricity, heat and fuels from renewable resources by 2050.

With a 50% wind penetration target, Denmark is still putting a lot of stock in wind. But the recent package is notable for its comprehensive approach to combined heat and power, biogas, geothermal heat pumps, and biofuels — with strong national financing mechanisms to tie all of these sectors together.

Of course, any good clean energy policy should aggressively promote efficiency. With a target for reducing final energy consumption 7% in 2020 compared with 2010 levels, Denmark is putting conservation and efficiency at the top of its priority list. Here are some of the initiatives just agreed upon:

• Energy companies must realize specific energy savings exceeding today’s requirements, e.g. by consulting energy experts and by offering subsidies to e.g. households and businesses.
• Energy companies must increase efforts by 75% from 2013 to 2014, and by 100% from 2015 to 2020 compared to 2010-12.
• A comprehensive strategy for energy renovation of all Danish buildings will
  be developed.

The focus on industrial heating and cooling is also a major part of the plan. Here in the U.S., we tend to focus all our attention on electricity generation and almost no attention on thermal energy. But like other European nations, Denmark is ahead of the curve in encouraging changes in this sector. The plan includes:

• Converting from coal to biomass at large-scale power plants will be made more attractive by amending the Heating Supply Act.
• The smaller open-field plants that are struggling in the wake of high heating prices will be allowed to produce cheap heating based on biomass.
• DKK 35 million will be committed to promoting new renewable technologies, e.g. geothermal energy and large heat pumps.
• Banning installation of oil-fired boilers and natural gas boilers in new buildings from 2013.
• Banning installation of new oil-fired boilers in existing buildings in areas where district heating or natural gas is available from 2016.
• Committing DKK 42 million in 2012-15 to fund the conversion from oil-fired boilers and natural gas boilers in existing buildings to renewable energy.

The plan also focuses on industrial activities, using incentives and enforcement mechanisms to get large companies to make changes in their energy use:

• A subsidy should be given to help promote investment in energy efficient use of renewable energy in the production processes of enterprises. In the period 2014 to 2020, the subsidy will be increased to DKK 500 million a year from DKK 250 million in 2013.
• Funding of DKK 30 million per year from 2013 to 2020 will be introduced to maintain and promote industrial CHP in industries and greenhouses.

Incentives for biogas expansion, a national framework for a smart grid, and a renewed commitment to R&D for innovative energy technologies are part of the targets as well. This is about as “comprehensive” as a comprehensive clean energy plan gets.

Here in the U.S., we tend to focus exclusively on wind and solar. Considering that these are the two fastest-growing clean energy industries globally, that makes sense. But wind and solar are only one piece of a truly meaningful energy transition.

When we get serious about clean energy in this country, we may want to take a page from Denmark’s “all of the above” clean energy playbook and focus on under-served sectors that can have a major impact on energy use.

As you can see, the issue here isn’t that the labor market in Sweden is so much better than the labor market in Denmark. But Sweden’s recession was much milder than Denmark’s, and it seems to be on track for a faster recovery. What happened? Well, consider the exchange rates:

Pre-crisis, both Sweden and Denmark were pursuing de facto currency pegs to the Euro. Denmark and Sweden were also both prosperous high-tax high-spending countries. Denmark had, however, substantially less structural unemployment than Sweden. They have some different labor market policies and also very different immigration policies that I believe gave them a more favorable demographic. But whatever the reason, there’s a clear structural gap here. Then comes the crisis, and unemployment rises in both countries. Yet it more than doubles in Denmark, which sticks with the peg, while increasing by a smaller percentage in Sweden which ditches it. Then the recovery in Sweden is sufficiently more rapid to catch up with Danish unemployment for the first time since the Nordic Banking Crisis of the early 1990s. Resolving the sources of the underlying structural gap would be nice, but it was by no means necessary to weathering the crisis better. And unlike the Australia-America gap, I trust nobody’s going to try to tell me the Sweden-Denmark gap is all about Chinese demand for coal.

Max Chafkin of Inc goes to the socialist dystopia of Norway and finds that it’s a hotbed of entrepreneurship. He makes various excellent points in the course of doing so, but I do always think people need to be careful when talking about Norway since they’re so rich (on a per capita basis) in terms of oil and gas reserves. The primary thing Norway is a good example of is excellent management of natural resources, a score on which many resource-rich countries have fallen down.

But what if Chafkin had hopped on a plane and flown to Copenhagen? I was struck to learn recently that a Heritage Foundation / WSJ op-ed page survey decided Denmark has more “economic freedom” than the United States of America. Well, it also has taxes as a much higher share of GDP, much less inequality, stronger labor unions, and it’s dramatically “greener” in terms of per capita (or per unit of GDP) carbon emissions. It seems to me that all things considered, progressives would gladly make the swap. And apparently conservatives would, too.

Fishback tries to account for this, but as Kenworthy explains he gets it wrong:

In his paper, Fishback cites similar numbers from the OECD. He cautions, though, that “One advantage the poor Americans would have had in spending their disposable income is that they face consumption tax rates in the 4 to 7 percent range, while consumption taxes in the Nordic countries are above 20 percent.” Actually, consumption tax rates are incorporated in the purchasing power parities (PPPs) used to convert incomes to a common currency, so these income figures already adjust for differences in consumption taxes.

Two important things to further note about this. One is that as Fishback himself notes “[p]ublic services not counted in disposable income, like health care and education, likely are better for the very poor in the Nordic countries than in the United States.” The other is simply that Denmark and especially Sweden have per capita GDPs that are lower than America’s in PPP terms (Denmark I think is close at market exchange rate, and Sweden is lower either way). So for better or for worse, the Nordics are clearly putting a lot more effort into helping the poor. Conversely, America is doing much more than Denmark (and I think a bit more than Sweden) to help poor people born in foreign countries by letting them come live and work here, though again the Nordics have more foreign aid.

This seems a bit like a joke designed to get me to write a blog post, but apparently Caron Butler is coming back to DC to promote bicycle-friendly cities in concern with Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark:

Caron Butler, one of the few, the happy few, members of the Washington Wizards these last few seasons before the team got blown up, returns to town this morning to, according to organizers, promote “a more bicycle-friendly America.”

Butler’s partner on this patriotic ride will be…Frederick Andre Henrik. He’s billed as the Crown Prince of Denmark.

Copenhagen and Amsterdam are the leaders in developed world bicycle commuting, and there’s a fair amount mid-sized American cities could learn from them. Here’s an amusing account (“As the night wore on, she touched his smooth hairless chest and showed interest in the prince’s kingdom”) of the Crown Prince’s courting of his Australian wife. Butler learned to play basketball in prison, which I imagine is rather different than the upbringing of Danish royalty.

(her majesty's publick domaine photougraphe or something)

Tyler Cowen says spending cuts will be necessary in the UK and asks “what is the U.S. ‘progressive’ take on this question. Is it admitted that spending cuts are necessary?”

According to the Guardian when Labour took over in 1997, total public spending in the UK was something like 38.2 percent of GDP. That slowly-but-steadily rose over time until it stood at 43.3 percent of GDP in the 2008-2009 budget. I wouldn’t say that cuts from that level are “necessary” but it’s generally advisable for countries to have political coalitions alternate in power and after more than a decade of center-left spending hikes some center-right spending cuts could play a useful role in clearing out dead wood and such. Alternatively, a responsible center-left government could shut down bad programs of its own accord while perhaps continuing to boost overall spending. Then the crisis budget of 2009-2010 pushed public spending up to 48 percent of GDP (or probably more likely, the decline in GDP pushed the public share up).

That seems advisable as a crisis measure. The Tory-proposed austerity budget would have been a disaster. But 48 percent is at the very Scandinavian Bleeding Edge of what we’ve seen in terms of a sustainably-sized public sector and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to fear that one’s country can’t pull it off. So while I doubt cuts are strictly speaking necessary, they’re probably advisable once GDP is growing (which I believe was Gordon Brown’s position) which I believe is currently the case. The good news for Britain is that even in coalition mode it’s relatively easy for a UK government to act decisively.

Meanwhile at the moment both Denmark and Sweden are in the hands of center-right governments, but that’s likely to change in the near future. It will be interesting to see if one of those countries attempts to devise an economically and politically sustainable approach to getting over fifty percent.

(cc photo by @boetter)

In Copenhagen, like several other European cities, management of the public bus system is contracted out to a private company, in this case the British company Arriva. One consequence of this is that you get much more bus-related marketing gimmicks than you see in the socialistic United States. Ashley Braun at Grist tells us about the latest:

Copenhagen’s buses are introducing another way of getting around while you get around town: “love seats,” or “kærlighedssæder.” (Gesundheit!) A social experiment of Danish bus company, Arriva, these special spots aim to make things a little cozier for those would-be cuddlers who haven’t been feeling the love on public transit.

“You can sit here either if you want to signal to your fellow passengers that you’re single or if you feel in a very good mood,” Marianne Faerch of Arriva said.

These aren’t “love seats” in the sense of furniture that’s smaller than a couch but bigger than a chair. Rather, they’re specially labeled seats that you sit in if you want to signal that you’d be interested in flirting with strangers on the bus. This sounds not so promising to me, but it’s good to see cities trying to innovate with their bus networks. The low-hanging fruit of better transportation policy is finding ways to make buses more functional and appealing, since if you can create bus lines that people actually use it’s pretty cheap and easy to just add new lines. Copenhagen is, in general, a world leader in transportation innovation so it’s always worth watching their ideas.

People tend to prefer PPOs to HMOs. PPOs tend to be more expensive than HMOs. But HMOs tend to have a higher actuarial value. The average PPO is in the low 80s, while the average HMO is 93 percent.

The reason is that PPOs make up for their easy access to specialists by building in more copayments and cost-sharing. HMOs offer more first-dollar coverage, and though specialists are more irksome to access, there’s less cost-sharing. But people prefer ease of access to coverage, so the HMO’s actuarial advantage doesn’t translate into a market preference. In other words, actuarial value isn’t everything.

It’s worth observing that Danish people have the reverse set of preferences.

Danes have two insurance options to choose from for outpatient care. Group 1 is an HMO-style system in which all doctors’ visits are free, but in order to see a specialist you need to get cleared by your primary care physician. Group 2 is a PPO-style system in which there’s cost-sharing when you see a doctor (the government still pays most of the tab, but you need to pay some) but you have the right to go see a specialist directly. Group 1 includes a staggering 98.5 percent of the population indicating an overwhelming preference for cheaper over easier access.

I think the strong, but opposite, US and Danish preferences are mostly about status quo bias. In the United States, HMOs were a relatively new innovation and people have proved willing to spend a considerable amount of extra money to avoid them. In Denmark it’s the reverse, and the Group 2 option is an innovation after decades of non-availability, and Danes seem uninterested in giving up their traditional free medicine in order to get more flexibility.

Danish Defense Minister Søren Gade with Robert Gates (Denmark MOD photo)

The news that NATO defense ministers are prepared to back a counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan seems a little bit weird given that we’re in the middle of a debate about what to do here in the United States. Something I noticed in Europe was that NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former Prime Minister of Denmark, actually seemed considerably more hawkish in his rhetoric on Afghanistan than Barack Obama is.

And it actually turns out that Denmark, which until recently was under his leadership, was, in fact, putting more effort into Afghanistan than the United States was. Denmark only has 700 soldiers in Afghanistan of whom 26 have been killed, but Denmark has about as many people in it as Cook County. Scaled up to America’s population this would be as if we had had about 1,400 soldiers killed out of a 38,000-strong deployment. Of course in a war absolute number count and Denmark is still a small contributor. But part of the context for what happens at these meetings is, I think, the fact that NATO’s civilian chief is a guy who was the architect of what’s been, for his country, a pretty major war.

There’s often a kind of conventional idea on the left that the United States is an unusually racist society. And I think there’s also often a kind of image of Europe as a place where more of the progressive agenda has been achieved than in the USA. But I think that you’ll find if you look at Europe through the eyes of the liberal agenda that while the German left has certainly been more successful than the American left at securing universal health care, it’s been much less successful at promoting a tolerant, integrated, multicultural society. And allowing for the errors implicit in making any kind of sweeping generalization, I’d say that’s pretty generally the case across Europe. This Swiss People’s Party campaign poster would, I think, make Jesse Helms blush. And I’m not even sure which of the Northern League posters from Italy is the most egregious.

In the US, in other words, racial problems have been more salient for a long time since we’ve been a racially diverse society for a long time. But by the same token, for all the problems we have with us today, we’ve made enormous progress over the years. Racial and ethnic tensions are a common problem in the world, and the United States manages diversity pretty well in comparison with other places (not just in Europe) even if we fall short in some absolute terms. Just look at Barack Obama. I think we’ll be waiting a while yet before someone of non-European ancestry is elected head of government in a European country. Denmark has some great public policy ideas, but it’s also kind of made itself into the gated community of nations in a way I don’t find particularly appealing.

At any rate, in some sense it’s probably true that white America has “lost” “its” country, but that’s a good thing. It’s everyone’s country!

Whether reform passes this year or not, the status quo really is untenable. Something will have to change someday. And what Obama and Baucus are proposing is close to the minimum amount of change conceivable. If insurance-industry groups succeed in killing the bill, the lesson will be that appeasement hasn’t worked. And that may mean that next time around, reformers will start thinking big and try to put health care under democratic control and financed on the basis of solidarity. Industry may vehemently oppose even modest reforms, maybe trying to kill it off entirely. That would be an ugly fight that would mean years of delay in providing help to people who urgently need it. But unless insurers can recognize how much the powers that be are bending over backward to be nice to them, it might be the only way forward in the long run.

Here’s my earlier post on health care in Denmark and here’s health care in Sweden. The systems are similar, though I’d say Sweden’s is marginally better. The Swedish government’s English-language description of their system also includes my new favorite health policy catchphrase: “Swedish health and medical care is based on the principles that care should be provided on equal terms and according to need, that is should be under democratic control and financed on the basis of solidarity.”

Freshly returned from a great trip to Scandinavia, I can’t help but enjoy the FuckYeahScandinavia tumblr that I was first shown this morning. That said, no fan of northern Europe can avoid observing that several of the countries the tumblr covers aren’t technically “Scandinavian.” Americans often find this a bit confusing but Scandinavia, strictly speaking, only refers to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. If you want to add in Iceland and Finland and miscellaneous extra territories (Åland, Faeroe Islands, Greenland) the word you’re looking for is “Nordic.”

I don’t totally understand why the distinction has been drawn this way—but roughly the point is that Finnish is a very different language from the others and that Iceland is clearly a geographically distinct phenomenon from the rest.

The larger point, however, is that the giant phone in this Robyn video is totally awesome. I also like that in Sweden health care is “under democratic control and financed on the basis of solidarity.”

Connie Hedegaard (photo by Kate Sheppard)

Kate Sheppard was on the same trip to Denmark as I was, and wrote up this post about our conversation with Connie Hedegaard, Folketing member for the Conservative People’s Party and Minister for Climate and Energy in the current Liberal-CPP coalition government:

“It’s at the core of conservatism to take care of the environment, to protect nature, to use resources responsibly,” said Hedegaard. “I can think of nothing that’s more conservative than that.”

Her priority, she said, is that their policies be vehicles for economic growth. The export of clean tech increased 19 percent last year, triple what it was ten years ago. Just recently it passed pork as the country’s leading export product.

“I have tried to turn this into a growth agenda. It is not an anti-growth agenda,” she said. “Often back in the ’70s for the left, socialists and liberals, it was an anti-growth agenda. In a world where we’re going to become 9 billion people by the middle of this century, we must have growth. The challenge is to make this growth more green, to make it sustainable.”

This is basically a Teddy Roosevelt kind of view that from time to time has been espoused by John McCain here in the United States. Starting in the waning days of the Presidential campaign, and continuing for most of the Obama administration, this strain of green conservatism seems to have largely vanished. It recently got a bit of a boost, however, in the form of a joint op-ed by John Kerry and Lindsay Graham. Still, one strains to come up with an example of a right-of-center American politician whose level of commitment to the climate change issue would be recognizable by a Hedegaard or an Angela Merkel or a Nicholas Sarkozy. In part that reflects interest-group politics—the United States is a significant producer of fossil fuels in a way that only Norway is in Europe. But in large part I do think it reflects a kind of failure of intellect and imagination that American politicians have occasionally flirted with transcending, usually only to return to orthodoxy soon enough.

At any rate, unless I’m badly misunderstanding what they’re reporting, Denmark seems to be weathering the current global downturn quite well.

As everyone emphasizes, the cheapest form of renewable energy is really energy efficiency—just not wasting as much energy. A cousin of this point, however, is that the truly cheapest thing of all is to just do with less. So for example, American houses actually use slightly less heat energy per square meter than do European houses. But since American houses are much bigger than European houses, we use far more energy in home heating than do Europeans. The Danes are substantially more efficient than the average Europeans, so they use less energy per square meter than we do despite living in a much colder climate. But on top of that, the average Danish house is about half the size of the average American house.

Since home-related energy use is a big deal and housing is a big component of household finances, the large size of American houses is a really important aspect of the American way of life. And it is worth asking how valuable our super-sized homes really are. It’s definitely a good thing that our modern houses are much bigger than houses were circa 1900. That brought about substantial reductions in overcrowding and real benefits in human welfare. It seems to be the case, however, that we’ve crossed over into territory where further increases in house size are driven by positional arms races. People aren’t looking for bigger houses, in other words, they’re looking for houses bigger than their friends’ houses in a way that’s not producing much of any net gains in welfare.

If that’s right, then we’re really wasting a disturbing quantity of resources not only building the very large homes but also heating them. Housing spending has the long duration properties of investment goods, but it’s not really productive the way a factory or an office building is. It’s just a very big, very expensive, very durable consumer good. Which is fine, insofar as it’s really leading to satisfied consumers. But it seems that it isn’t and if we all crowded into Danish-sized houses we’d quickly adjust, feel just as good about ourselves, and then go buy more non-housing stuff (or if we actually moved to Denmark, spend the money we’re saving on housing paying very high taxes in exchange for generous public services).

There’s more to that than taxes, of course, but the high taxes really are integral to the whole thing. And that includes the environmental piece. In part because there are directly pro-environment taxes. But also, I would say, in large part because it’s the egalitarian income distribution and robust redistributive state that makes the environmental policies tolerable. Cheap gas and electricity are, in part, what we do in the United States instead of real social policy.

All of which is just to emphasize a point I’ve been making a lot over the past few months: there’s no way to have a progressive renaissance in the United States unless progressives find some politically feasible way of directly making the case that higher taxes for better services can be a good trade. And it’s worth trying to be honest about this. The other American journalists I’m traveling with, all lefty environmentalist types, can’t stop complaining about how expensive basic consumer goods are here. And it’s true, stuff’s expensive! But college and preschool and doctors and hospitals are all free, and the carbon emissions are low. This is, I think, a good trade but it really is a trade. Low taxes plus cheap dirty energy and large numbers of poor people will give you cheaper restaurants.

Was out in the suburbs of Copenhagen today for a bit, and they look, well, a lot like American suburbs except with smaller-than-average houses. But if you go visit an American suburb with smaller-than-average houses—usually an older one—then you’ll very much have the right idea. What was quite different, however, was the transportation from the suburbs into the central city. Copenhagen’s suburbs are organized around the “finger plan” illustrated in the map on the right. Each finger is, as you would do in the United States, built around an arterial road. But the roads have fewer lanes than an American arterial would have. But running alongside them (or at least running alongside the one our bus was driving on) are very nice, very wide bike paths. And roughly parallel to the roadways are the S-Tog commuter rail lines.

Consequently, there are fewer people driving on the road than you would have in the US and there are more people biking and taking the train.

It’s worth noting that this sort of thing leaves overall automobile congestion neither better nor worse than an alternative strategy of fewer options and wider roads would. Insofar as you build road capacity, drivers will fill that capacity up. You get a choice of what level of automobile traffic you want to see the congestion at. But if you actually want uncrowded rush hour roads then you have basically only two choices. One is that you can build “road to nowhere” type projects where the economic rationale for infrastructure development is so poor that people don’t really want to drive on your shiny new highway. The other is that you can do congestion-pricing. But absent congestion-pricing, even the really admirable provision of alternative modes has limited impact. When valuable goods are given away for free, you get shortages. Copenhagen is apparently considering following Stockholm and Oslo and implementing a congestion fee, but they haven’t done it yet.

Still the moral of the story is, I think, pretty clear. When you build infrastructure to facilitate commuting from suburbs to central cities, lots of people will avail themselves of the opportunity to move to the new suburbs. But how they actually get to the central city depends on what kind of infrastructure you build. If you build giant highways, they’ll drive. If you build smaller roads and also some trains, then some people will drive and some will take the train.

For the sake of comparison, note that Copenhagen is a pretty small city. There are 521,000 people in the city proper and 1.8 million in the metro area. That would make it the 30th largest metro area in the United States, slightly bigger than the Las Vegas MSA and slightly smaller than the Kansas City MSA. All told, about 129 million Americans live in metropolitan areas that are bigger than metro Copenhagen. About a third of Danish people live in Greater Copenhagen, whereas over 40 percent of Americans live in metro areas that are bigger than Greater Copenhagen.

On the Wikipedia page for Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who currently leads a center-right (by Danish standards) coalition, I read the following about his time as Finance Minister before Anders Fogh Rasmussen stepped down as PM to be the top civilian official in NATO:

In February 2009, Lars Løkke Rasmussen was the chief negotiator in the political agreement behind a major tax reform, implementing the government’s ambition of reducing income tax and increasing taxes on pollution. The reform was, according to Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the biggest reduction of the marginal tax rate since the introduction of the income tax in 1903. The opposition accused it of being historically skewed in favouring those with high-income jobs and giving very little to those with low-income jobs.

You can read Google’s translation of Danish newspaper articles about this here and here. Relative to the tax agenda pursued by George W. Bush, Rasmussen’s approach:

1. Achieves the U.S. right-wing’s core policy objective of reducing taxes on rich people.
2. Also contributes to solving a bona fide public policy problem.
3. Does a much better job relative to the budget deficit, an issue the U.S. right-wing at least claims to care about.
4. Would have screwed around with the Democratic Party’s political coalition by attracting support from green groups and from upscale liberal voters.

That seems like a lot to like had a more serious, thoughtful, and courageous group of people been in power. Obviously the interest-group politics is totally different in Denmark where there are substantial industries around wind power and efficiency and basically no fossil fuel production. They use coal and oil, in other words, but don’t produce much of any so there’s not the same kind of pro-pollution constituency. That accounts for part of the difference. But much of the rest of the difference seems like a lack of imagination combined with a lack of good sense and a lack of morality.

I’m here in Denmark primarily to learn about energy and environmental policy, but visiting a country is always a good time to fire up the old Google and learn about health care policy. 84 percent of Danish health spending is accounted for by the state, with the remaining sixteen percent mostly representing out-of-pocket spending on medicines and dental products. The state just straightforwardly pays for care out of tax revenue. Denmark has the highest taxes in the world, and part of the reason is that they rather efficiently don’t monkey around with a lot of quasi-taxes in which they make employers contribute to health funds or whatever. It’s just straight-up tax and spend.

For the purposes of non-hospital care, all Danes need to choose to be either in Group 1 or Group 2. Children under the age of 15 are enrolled in the group chosen by their parents, and when you turn 15 you’re enrolled by default in Group 1, though you’re free to choose Group 2. In practice, almost nobody chooses Group 2 and Group 1 covers 98.5 percent of the population. The good news for Group 1 patients is that you get to choose your general practitioner and you get to see him (or a substitute if he’s sick or on vacation or if you’re traveling in another town or what have you) for free. You also get to see specialists for free, but only with a recommendation from the GP. In Group 2 you need to pay a portion of the cost of a visit to the doctor, but you have the right to go directly to a specialist.

Denmark has 4,100 general practitioners and 1,200 practicing specialists, which I believe is a way higher GP:specialist ratio than we have in the United States.

Hospitals-wise, Denmark is organized into five regions. The basic idea is that if you need to go to a hospital, you go to one of the ones your region runs. However, certain kinds of services may be so specialized that they’re not available in all regions, so the regions have reciprocity agreements with each other in which you might get sent to an out-of-region hospital. Denmark is also a pretty small country—a population larger than Minnesota but smaller than Wisconsin—so for some rare treatments you may need to go out of the country, and it’s possible to get the state to pay for that.

Denmark also has a private hospital sector. Some of what happens in the private hospitals is that they provide specialized care under contract with the regions. In addition, the ruling center-right coalition introduced a law in 2002 saying that citizens may choose to go to a private hospital or clinic “if the waiting time for treatment exceeds two months and the chosen hospital has an agreement with the regions’ association regarding the offer for treatment.” In 2007 they expanded this initiative by reducing the waiting time to one month.

Denmark spends a relatively large amount on health care, but it’s very close to its fellow small northern European countries. Lately Denmark has been putting more emphasis on preventive health. This is probably a good idea since Denmark’s life expectancy, though slightly higher than America’s, is near the bottom for western Europe.