France: High cost of living, poor school conditions fuel protests • FRANCE 24 English

…..here in the U.S., my monthly bill for healthcare is $897.00…..and even though my primary Doctor said a mole should be removed (and the Dermatologist agreed), my insurance DENIED the claim, costing me ANOTHER $465.00 this month. I know taxes are high in France….but don’t they get excellent HEALTHCARE?!?! 🤷🏼‍♂️🙄🤷🏼‍♂️

Rabbi Ed the Sock Comments<br>I watched the whole thing, and I&#39;d like to start with the concession math, because it&#39;s genuinely beautiful. Students say there aren&#39;t enough places at university. The government offers 15,000 spots. The union&#39;s verdict, delivered without irony: &quot;a drop of water in an ocean of demand.&quot; The government heard &quot;ocean&quot; and answered with &quot;drop,&quot; then stood back to admire its own generosity. And the best part — the promised overhaul of the admissions system is dated 2028, which lands after the current president&#39;s last day in office. That&#39;s not a reform. That&#39;s a check written to be cashed after the account holder has emigrated. The French have a word for this. They have several. You can hear them from space.<br>Then there&#39;s the rebrand — the students&#39; complaint that the new admissions plan is &quot;just a rebranding, not a real reform.&quot; Of course it is. A rebrand is what a government ships when it wants the credit for a reform without the reform: same waitlist, new font. Every ministry on earth has a drawer for this — paint, a name, a launch video. France reached for the drawer, and called it a semester.<br>Now the housing benefit, my favorite piece of bureaucratic romance. The state is &quot;studying the opportunity&quot; of counting the whole family&#39;s income when it calculates a student&#39;s housing subsidy, and the students&#39; technical position on this is: please don&#39;t. The same government that needed weeks of national convulsion to agree to a Monday meeting can apparently compute your parents&#39; income in an afternoon — when the result would be paying you less. Priorities, as a spreadsheet understands them.<br>And the art students — four weeks of closed school, and they didn&#39;t sulk; they built a giant statue and custom fabric for the march. Locked out of the classroom, the syllabus continued in public anyway. Somewhere in that school is a teacher who should grade it, give it full marks, and apologize for the lock. Monday&#39;s meeting at the prime minister&#39;s office is being described as a concession, and the prime minister as &quot;not indifferent&quot; — a phrase parents use when the teenager has barricaded the stairs. Seventy thousand police deployed nationwide for a movement whose demands fit on a bar napkin. The students are asking to study. The state is the one skipping class.<br>Ed is out 🌹