[loginalready]

The EU is not a country. The EU has no single healthcare system.

Every country has it's own system, which range from anything between 100% government provided to mostly privatized. No system is the same. And it's not just the EU, it's the entire Western civilization outside the US.

This is extremely important, because the healthcare debate in the US is falsely framed as a choice for or against "socialized medicine", were in reality socialized medicine is a rarity amongst the various healthcare systems.

Whether or not to make quality healthcare accessible to everyone is not an ideological choice, the problem can be solved within the framework of any political ideology.

It's strictly a choice between decent healthcare for everyone or bigger profits for the healthcare industry.

[polemic]

This.

Germany has compulsory health care insurance, Britain has the NHS, New Zealand has a largely free public health care system (with ACC for accident care and private health insurance for those that can afford a slightly higher level of care).

These are all "socialized" schemes of one variety or another, but they all work. You'd get funny looks framing a discussion about health care in those sorts of terms in most of those countries - and the stories shared here sound perverse to anyone in a western democracy outside of the US.

[alan_cx]

As I understand it, there sort of is the same health care across the EU. There is an EU healthcare card which means any EU citizen gets treated in any EU country. The systems are different, but in the end we can all get healthcare free at the point of delivery. No absurd bill.

The details of how each country does it are different, but the result is the same. No insane bills to stay alive. No poor turned away or treated like second class citizens.

I have to say, of all the things I cant get my head round about the US, the health care system is the biggest jaw dropper for me. Not only is it not universal, but the people who run it make incredible profit out of it. Seems mad to me.

[Someone]

Health care and health care insurance approaches are not the same across the EU, but the EU does proscribe that residents of any EU (1) country insured in one country get medical treatment in any other country (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Health_Insurance_Card)

(1) as always, there are zillions of EUs to choose from. Reading the Wikipedia page, it actually isn't the real EU, but the EU plus (all?) members of the EFTA.