It seems to me that many people who are opposed to socialized medicine don't necessarily disagree that it would give the poor better care; rather they fear that it will result in them receiving worse care.
Anecdotally, I'd say they do crap.
Friends outside LA are upper-middle class. Extremely good health insurance for the last 20+ years. Had a baby, emergency C-section. Less than 12 hours later they were told they must move hospital or else pay the $60,000 per day out of pocket because their insurance wouldn't cover it anymore. They had to drive themselves, in their own car, less than 12 hours after an emergency C-Section, with the infant.
Of of this after paying through the nose for 20+ years for excellent health insurance.
As an Australia/Canadian this is barbaric, and utterly unacceptable.
I can't imagine how any experiences I have with the NHS could be better privately, I have enough money that I could afford a private system if I had any idea why or how that could be better, so I'd be genuinely torn (I support the existence of the NHS and one way to kill something like the NHS is to encourage everybody who can afford to go privately to leave the system) but it never comes up at all.
Not everything is perfect, but the less-than-perfect things don't feel like private healthcare could fix them e.g.
At home I live near a hospital, because I live in a city, but where I grew up there isn't a nearby hospital. Private doesn't fix that, under the US system I might be even further from an "in network" option, and even in a sane system the private hospitals would be in similar places to those for a universal system, it doesn't help.
I had cancer years back. Nothing about this seemed awful except the "having cancer" part which I'm sure private healthcare doesn't get rid of. Curing cancer is urgent so there was no waiting for treatment, the staff were competent, my oncology consultants were the exact sort of "no nonsense" people I'd have picked if I had a free choice. The hospital was nice. A+++ would recommend (except cancer, don't get cancer)
Once upon a time I moved to a new city and friends were all like "Oh my god, get a private dentist, ugh, it's just impossible to get an NHS dentist". And being contrary I was like "Huh, I wonder how impossible it is?" and the answer was "You phone this number and they assign you one" and I'm still with the same dental practice twenty years later. In fact my specific dentist left last year and I was like "Oh, maybe he went private and I could follow?" but nope, he retired, I feel old. His replacement is young enough to be my daughter. But she's already nagging me about stuff just like he did, so that's fine.
I had a scary moment in a distant city last year, I had found a lump and was experiencing peripheral neuropathy. I went to an Urgent Care clinic and rather than examine me they booked me into my own GP for the next day and I went home early. In hindsight they should have examined me, because my GP was like "The clinic nurse could have told you this is not what you were worried it might be". But, would private healthcare have done the examination? That comes down to personal judgement by a clinic nurse, and money wouldn't change that.
In Canada, we have free healthcare. If you have the money you still can go private if you think you'll get a better care.
But I guarantee you won't go private for hearth surgery. There's not market for it because the care you get is already the best in the public sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Canada#Restricti...
There has been plenty of efforts put into allowing private clinics outside of the public system, but they have all been shutdown.
On the other hand, one thing that is usually ignored about Canadian healthcare when it's discussed in US, is the fact that it's run by provinces. Feds are involved, and most federal money that goes to healthcare comes with strings attached wrt how the resulting healthcare system should look; but ultimately the decision of how (and whether) to run healthcare is down to provinces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Health_Act#History:_Fed...
Furthermore, that system didn't come up all at once - a single province tried it first, and it had proven popular enough that other provinces gradually adopted it. Once it was sufficiently widespread, the federal government stepped in.
Given that federalism in US is more developed than in Canada, I don't understand why this isn't the approach advocated by most adherents here. If Saskatchewan could organize healthcare all by itself back in the day, surely so can California, New York etc.
However, I’d take issue with federalism being more developed in the US than Canada. In my experience, the federal gov’t wields much more power in Canada than the US.
However, your point stands that nothing is stopping the states from creating their own system. In fact, a few like CA and VT have proposed such arrangements, but they always fell through once the cost was apparent.
Federalism being more developed means exactly that - that regions have more power relative to the center. The stronger the central government is, the less federalism, and the more country is a unitary state rather than a federation.
When it comes to surgeries, then they refer you to the public services.