Ferdinand had no intention of addressing the medical issue just yet. As long as production costs could not be brought down, discussing it was nothing but empty talk. They could not possibly imitate future generations and set up an insurance company just to muddle through, could they?
Economic experts had calculated it long ago: if they were to rely on insurance companies to solve the problem of medical treatment, premiums of less than 150 lev were out of the question. That was roughly a Bulgarian ordinary worker's monthly income!
Add up all the mouths in his family, and a worker's income for an entire year—even if he neither ate nor drank—might not be enough to pay all the premiums. How could that possibly work?
Excessively high medical costs were the heart of the contradiction! If that problem could not be solved, nothing they did could succeed. They could not exactly make insurance companies operate at a loss, could they?
Pension insurance, on the other hand, could be introduced. But Bulgaria's pension problem was not serious at present. The average life expectancy was only a little over fifty, and those who lived past sixty-five were as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns.
Moreover, families now had many children, so the burden of supporting elderly parents was not heavy when divided among them. This social problem had yet to be triggered.
Inside the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Nicholas II was fretting over the loan. He had finally gotten Ferdinand to relent, yet what he could use to persuade the Bulgarian Government now gave him a headache.
Due to the intervention of the United Kingdom and French governments, international financial groups had successively shut their doors to loans for Russia. That was not entirely accurate, though. At the very least, the