[TMWNN]

>Let's not call the Swiss healthcare "private" or the US Americans will get the wrong impression.

As others have told you, you are wrong. The Swiss system is almost identical to that of the US post-Obamacare, albeit with 100% mandatory enrollment (as in, the local canton picks a plan and sends you the bill) as opposed to the US's system in which a tax penalty is levied.

>no free market as the very strict rules they must follow are written in law, primes and services are also controlled by the state

Just where do you think the prices for plans on the various US states' exchanges come from? Out of thin air? Yes, insurance companies have some leeway, but not as much as you think.

[soco]

What made me wrong was probably the fact that, although almost identical, for the end-user the two systems couldn't be more different. With all my critics, in Switzerland it quite works, while from the US is hear plenty of horror stories. So either private here is not private there, or I'm biased by what I read here and elsewhere about the US healthcare.

[TMWNN]

20% of the horror stories you hear are from young people who decided they don't need to sign up for health insurance then get in trouble.

60% (and, really, the 20% above and 20% below too) are from those upset that the US system isn't "free" because, as I wrote elsewhere, all they know of to compare with are the "free" UK and Canadian systems, so the whole world outside the US must be "free" and thus anything that isn't 100% "free" is fascism by billionaires, or something. When, really, the UK and Canadian systems are more aberrations than the US's is.

The remaining 20% are more like complaints about how different plans cover different things, or finding a doctor that accepts their plan, or unexpected difficulties with changing plans; that is, procedural issues. I don't mean to say that they are insignificant—I'm experiencing the last one myself—but they don't get the Internet mobs riled up as much as they get about the injustice of not having 100% "free" healthcare like "the rest of the world".

[jewayne]

You just haven't been paying close enough attention. Our health care system in the US sucks.

Are you going to try to defend the completely fictional numbers that end up on US hospital bills? And how those numbers drive the insurance protection racket? And how they'll say "but nobody pays that", when 1) ABSOLUTELY some people do end up paying full chargemaster rates, and 2) even a small fraction of chargemaster is usually a multiple of the actual cost of providing health care services