[latentsea]

> NZ has government provided healthcare. We really don't. You won't be bankrupted by hospital bills, but the absolute shambles that we're working with is far from an adequately functioning healthcare system.

We do have it though, and it works, though it's not perfect. Wait times are definitely long unless you go private, but the public system has helped me many times. I've not had to deal with ACC, so I can't speak to that.

In practice if you work for a good company you often get health insurance included or at a discount (at least all the software companies I've worked for have done this), so you get a mix of public/private healthcare and that works pretty decent.

I can't imagine the stress of the nightmare inducing hospital bills you hear about in the US.