A Broad View

Learning about Sweden’s government has made me think a lot about how much I know about the government in the United States.  My friend Pavla asked me last weekend about our government, how it works, how I felt about it, etc… It really made me aware of how opinionated I am about our system, and how I really don’t know it as well as I should. 

But that’s learning for another day.  Today I did some reading about the results of Sweden’s election and how their government works.  Here’s what I’ve learned:

There’s the Riksdag: which is the Swedish Parliament, and there are 349 seats in this body. 

In order to gain representation in this body, a political party must gain at least 4% of votes in the election. 

The latest election happened on Sunday, September 14^th.

 The Riksdag appoints a Prime Minister who then “forms the government”, or chooses who will be in his Cabinet and serve as the Heads of various Ministries.

Some results on the most recent election:

The Social Democrats, one of the parties in Sweden, gained 31.2% of votes cast on Sunday, which means that they will have more representation in the Riksdag than before.  They are now the third largest party in Sweden. (Lots of people aren’t very happy with this because the Social Democrats are very vocal about their anti-immigration beliefs.)  There were demonstrations against the racist beliefs of this party in Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg on Monday. 

It is interesting to hear about these changes and be an observer of these decisions.  I’ll be gone before anything really starts to change, but it will shape the country nonetheless. 

I met with a Social Worker, or Kurator, earlier this week and got a tour of the other Karolinska Institutet Sjukuset (Hospital) Campus, and I heard a lot about the changes made since the last election. 

It seems as though one political party has been in power for the last 8 years, and when they took office they started changing the healthcare system.  Certain clinics and sections of the health care system were sold to private owners, and certain clinics were kept in the public system.   This mixture of public and private clinics is causing some problems for Sweden, because until now, or about 8 years ago, their healthcare was completely publicly funded and organized.  People would pay taxes and when they needed care it was freely available to them.  Now, there are some private companies that are generating profits from giving care and it seems as though Sweden doesn’t really know what to do with these profits.  They’ve never had them before! :P

I said I wanted a broad view of how one is cared for within this country.  I’m certainly getting more than I expected!  

Hej då från Sverige!