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by ferongr 3093 days ago
I live in a "first world nation" and 10 years ago (before the global financial crisis even) public vs private healthcare meant the difference between leg amputation and implantation. The public system is only good for routine diagnosis and minor surgery. For everything else, care quality goes down the toilet. Not to mention on the effectively complete lack of dental care.
2 comments

I'm not sure where you live and you're not providing any links or statistics to back this claim up, so it's difficult for me to respond to what you're trying to claim here. If you read the link I provided, you would see that they use cancer, heart disease, and diabetes mortality as a shorthand for patient outcomes in significant health events, and that while the US healthcare system ranks reasonably well in cancer treatment, it is significantly behind other developed nations in treating heart disease and diabetes. They also provide statistics regarding mortality rates in various populations, and the US lags other developed nations in basically all of those populations.

Your point about dentistry is interesting, although also mostly unsupported, and I'm having a difficult time finding good statistics about dental care, spending, and outcomes. Anecdotally, dental care in the United States is sharply linked to money; people with money have good/great teeth and excellent dental care, people without it frequently have major issues with their teeth. I don't know how that compares to other countries.

What country is this?