[ido]

Fair enough.

Regarding:

> the government guarantees healthcare, but that doesn't mean that you will always be healthy.

It guarantees you will always get treated if you seek such treatment (within reason, basically all actual medical problems will be treated for free here). I had spent 3 weeks in a hospital including numerous tests (MRI, CT, ultrasound) & concluded in brain surgery.

I paid next to nothing & despite nobody being able to guarantee the procedure would be a success I think this is as close as you can reasonably get.

I would be surprised if the same in the US will not have resulted in a hefty bill, even for most people covered under generous employer-backed health insurance.

[luckylion]

I don't know about the US version, it probably depends on the insurance company. My point is just that there's no guarantee of success, only of trying.

If we need 4 million apartments, but only 3.5m physically exist, we can't decree the remaining 500k into existance, they still need to be built. They are currently not built for unrelated reasons (city planning, permits, speculation etc), not because "we" (as a society) don't want them to be built. I don't see that changing anytime soon in the large cities, because the population is generally against higher population density, construction projects and longer commutes. Policies will not change that, unless massive changes in laws take away citizen's ability to protest and stop new development projects.