‘Maybe you’re just someone with blood in their urine’

I hate to say it because I'm generally an advocate of nationalized health care and think it's a good idea, but this is exactly the kind of case where in a national system she would have gotten no help. The US system allows for a lot of coverage for specialists for middle class patients that would be completely inaccessible in a single payer system. For those I know in developed countries with single payer systems what they've done for complex and critical medical cases like this is fly to the U.S. and pay what they can out-of-pocket.

21000 is a lot of money, but I would say the specialist care in this case was worth it. And her insurance undoubtedly paid out at least 4x that amount. It's sad that far from all people can afford an amount like that, but I would say this is more of an example of the system working rather than not working, since it seems like the alternative is no one (except maybe celebrities and elite) getting such care at all.