The Netherlands has mandatory private insurance and it works well for them. The insurers are heavily regulated though.
See: https://www.kff.org/health-costs/issue-brief/how-repeal-of-t...
I've heard that many American workers quit in the early days of the month, so that their ex-employer is still covering their health insurance that month, and their next employer (presuming they have another job to go to) picks it up in the next month. I can't imagine how many people are stuck in jobs they hate just because they are afraid to be without insurance. It can't be good for anyone.
It seems like it is good for employers for employees to be more precarious and dependent on them.
Also, many health insurance plans from your employer don't start immediately. Sometimes you have to tiptoe around for 90 days until you get coverage.
Source: American, and it's always funny to hear what people in other countires 'think' about the USA
I won't defend the specific scenario given but the second sentence there is a huge generalization. You're correct that insurance plans don't start immediately, but that also leaves people in a difficult, even if temporary, situation.
Europeans however are correct to think that the healthcare system in the US is abysmal, because it is. All this goes without saying that employment-tied insurance puts people in precarious positions, which is obvious.
It would be nice to not have to do that, but in the grand scheme of things (less than) a month is not a very long period of time.
The US systems is royally fucked; sardonically quipping about "those crazy foreigners" doesn't make it better.
[1]https://www.careeraddict.com/top-5-countries-with-the-highes...
Notice how for the US the article doesn't even mention the upper bound for specialists. That's because there is none, and they expect that.
GPs are quite affordable, if it was just the GPs I wouldn't mind paying them $200-300 directly for a visit. But the specialists can really get you crying for mercy, especially if there's no insurance company between you and them.
I broke a leg a few years ago, and if I did not have insurance, the cost to me would be $55K (probably more, this doesn't count the follow-up visits). Surgery alone was $30K+ for about 2 hours of work, not including cost of anesthesia ($5K). Insurance got the total down to about $7K, which is still a lot of money for a relatively run-of-the-mill surgery. Cost to me was my deductible: $1K.
No drama, no discussion, no appeals or scary forms to fill out. Is this really what Americans mean when they talk about "freedom of choice"?
For starters, nobody waits in an emergency. If you need urgent care, you get it— with no second mortgage needed. Waiting times vary a lot across the provinces and depending what kind of care is needed. Cancer treatment, for example, is very fast.
Generally speaking, wait times are a function of overall funding, and funding has been cut repeatedly over the past three decades, as Canadians have consistently voted for tax cuts over investing in health care. See the decline as reported by the Fraser Institute: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wa... (Although of course, they're a right-wing think tank, so their agenda is further tax cuts and privatization... take from it what you will.)
As far as taxes, again beware of what you hear from US-based commentators about how bad it is. In fact, the income tax we pay is almost identical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Canadian_and_Ame...
A few weeks later I tried again and found someone could see me three months from then!
And I'm paying $400 a month to get this with a $6500 deductible??
The "long wait times" critique of Canadian health care makes no sense in the face of actual American health care access. It's the same here, except we pay coming and going for it.
It's not that there's something uniquely good about those countries' models. It's that there's something uniquely bad about ours.
Per capita costs are in large part (though not completely) determined by how much providers charge. Why shouldn't we look at "doctor salaries"?
I looked it up. The US health care system costs 25% more than Switzerland (the second most expensive in the world). That's not because of doctor salaries.