[josephg]

I live in Australia, and I don’t pay for private health insurance. Last year after travelling to Egypt I ended up in hospital with some gut related issue. I was let straight in from the emergency room. The doctors were great. I stayed overnight in one of the wards hooked up to machines and all that.

I was discharged the next day. I didn’t pay a cent. I didn’t even see a bill. I don’t think they made one.

I keep hearing stories from Americans about wait times in other countries. I’m sure it happens, but I’ve never seen it myself. My experiences with the medical system here has been pretty universally excellent.

When I was in America I was very impressed with how proactive everything is. My insurer paid for yearly physical exams. I’d never done that before. It’s certainly possible I would have even better health outcomes in America. But, I’m way happier here. And I’m a lot less stressed than I was when I lived in the Bay Area. That counts for a lot.

[nradov]

Pretty much all developed countries do fairly well on rapid access to emergency care. The queues are more of an issue with elective care. Socialized healthcare systems generally impose artificial supply limits to hold down costs, which is why we often see affluent Canadians come to the USA as medical tourists to skip the queue for certain procedures like MRI scans. While socialized systems might be better overall, there are certain drawbacks.

Outside of certain screenings, there is no proven benefit to yearly physical exams for healthy adults. It's a waste of resources and doesn't improve patient outcomes. Some people seem to want those annual exams, but they aren't justified on an evidence-based medicine basis.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/a-checkup-for-the-checku...

https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/preventive-care-benefits...

[josephg]

> Pretty much all developed countries do fairly well on rapid access to emergency care.

I was talking to a taxi driver in SF a few years ago. He said he was in a car accident once, and his car rolled and flipped upside down. The police & an ambulance showed up. Even though he seemed mostly ok they still wanted take him to hospital. But he couldn't afford the ambulance or the hospital - without health insurance, it would have bankrupted him. So he told them all to get lost.

In telling the story, he got kind of angry about it - I think he was mad how pushy the police and ambulance people were about the whole thing.

Thats vaguely horrifying to me. A man who was just in a car accident should never be put in a situation like this. If you're wealthy in america, yeah - you get top notch medical treatment. But I'm not sure I'd call that a successful system for emergency care.

[nradov]

I'm not claiming it's successful, just that people can generally get rapid access to high quality emergency medical care. Paying for it afterwards is a separate issue, and changes are needed there.

The No Surprises Act did give many consumers significant protection against excessive ER bills.

https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/no-surprises-unders...