Unless you have inspected your local hospital emergency room you are deluding yourself. I used to have a high opinion of free EU healthcare until I was neglected for 12 hours in the emergency room from 4 PM till 4 AM begging for assistance every time the ONE doctor (no nurses) on duty overnight walked by. She was working 30 patients by herself. If it was something more serious than dehydration I would have died on the ER waiting room floor where I sat for more than six hours because all 10 chairs along the wall were taken, and one bum reeked of stale feces and urine so badly my clothes smelled for hours after leaving the area just from being near him.
I have waited 12+ hours in a US emergency department to be seen, and my current health insurance company is actively attempting to implement policy where they can deny ER claims retroactively if they don’t believe it was an emergency. I pay for this privilege.
Everyone has their anecdotes. The data is clear Americans pay orders of magnitude more worse care and outcomes than other OECD countries.
In general, if you're not going to die in the next 3 hours, don't go to an ER.
Because of the laws surrounding ER care [0] and the fact that most hospitals with ERs are Trauma I & last resort, almost all operate in triage all the time.
The end result is that if you're not critical, you get care once they have enough time. And they never have enough time. Because they never have enough people.
Recommendations: only consider ERs in wealthy suburbs (where they'll be less overloaded with last-resort patients), go to an urgent care center (and expect to be screwed on price), or a walk-in doctor's office (best option).
Also, it seems the norm in the US to take Uber to hospitals now because the shits driving ambulances will charge you $2000+ for the ride. They will literally take advantage of your life-threatening situation to make a quick buck off you.
Welcome to what thinks they are a developed country.
UHC is very standard in the US. Most people won't have a choice. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it to save up cash and litigate after ER visits than to pay for health insurance.
A family friend’s daughter broker her arm in Mexico on vacation. Total cost to be seen and casted? $73 cash.
To your point, one should not have to optimize to be judgment proof in order to exist in their country, and that’s why (at least for myself) I’m optimizing to get out. There are so many other welcoming countries to expats, there’s no reason to stay if you have means and a network of colleagues that can ensure you can work remotely in perpetuity.
> A family friend’s daughter broker her arm in Mexico on vacation. Total cost to be seen and casted? $73 cash.
One of the issue is that a most of the healthcare issues that young, healthy people run into are surprisingly cheap. But the big costs come from chronic and elderly care. Who are the people who can't afford it. So it always seems like young, healthy people can get a better deal, but then who will pay for them when they're old?
I'm in the US, suburbs of a large city, and I have very good insurance. I waited 4 hours in the emergency room after getting rushed there in an ambulance for chest pain. After an initial EKG, which showed abnormalities, they just left for 4 hours before doing blood work that would definitively determine if it was a heart attack. Then they woke me up at 3:00am to tell me it wasn't a heart attack. They discharged me the next day with no referral, no follow-up plans, didn't even do an echo cardiogram. They did do a 15 minute stress test but had to stop after 7 minutes because my heart rate went too high, and yet still discharged me. But I did hear someone talking about how they really wanted to push everyone out that day since it was a Friday and didn't want to have to deal with a bunch of patients in the weekend.
On my own accord I went to a cardiologist who immediately did an echo and found a very serious problem.
Maybe places in the EU don't have great healthcare, but that's not much different than the US except that in the US you can still go bankrupt paying for bad healthcare, even if you have insurance.
I have noticed similar issues but I don't think you would have "died on the ER waiting room floor": if you were in for dehydration then you were treated as such, i.e. low priority. That's really all there is to it. Sometimes people are misdiagnosed and that's when there really is a problem, but that's independent of the country, and Doctors do everything they can to make sure this does not happen. In most of Europe you go to the hospital to be treated, your comfort is really considered secondary unless you are in very bad health. The stinky guy next to you had the same rights that you do, but the system is such that you both should be treated equally and given proper care. The system is not perfect but it does its best to follow these principles.
I've also spent nights waiting for attention in emergency rooms. Being made to wait in an emergency room is usually a good sign. If you had something that would've killed you in 12h, I believe the doctor on duty would have been more likely to prioritize you.
