Personally, I think sick people who don't have paid sick leave should be paid to cough on people who oppose requirements for paid sick leave.
> Long term care for the elderly, the dying, the long term mentally ill etc. is covered by social insurance funded from earmarked taxation under the provisions of the Algemene Wet Bijzondere Ziektekosten, which came into effect in 1968.
The rules were tightened up, and without any explict legal language banning them, insurance companies dropped such policies because they knew they could not satisfy the new rules requiring actual coverage.
Under an Obamacare cheapest possible insurance option you're not going to be bankrupted by (for example) a heart attack, but you'll still be paying the bill for a long time. That ignores hospitals like SF general that charge you directly (and are out of network) so you can still be trivially bankrupted.
It’s the elimination of the uninsured risk (aka will I get paid for treating this individual) that is the difference. Not whether the healthcare provider is employed directly by the state.
I've lived in two different countries which have competently managed and effective health care systems. They're different from each other and it's noticeable, but so are various traits they share. They both try to learn from what other countries are doing better, they both keep costs down, they both are competently managed and essentially socialist (that is, they work for the entire population).
Here's a trio of predictions: At least one of the competent European health systems will mishandle the Corona crisis and a lot more people will die than in the neighbouring countries. The American fanbois will use that as a solid proof that anything and everything that country's health system is wrong, including the things its neighbours also do. Noone in the American health system will try to learn from the more successful handling in some European countries, and definitely not from any country like South Korea or Taiwan, outside the Indoeuropean language zone.
In fact the only completely private parts have reasonable prices.
Switzerland [1]. And the Netherlands has a mostly-private system [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherland...
On the other hand, the state (each canton) pours large amounts of money into hospitals and research. There are laws and regulations at various levels (edit: eg how many doctors may open a new cabinet), and in these days we are reminded that doctors can be mandated to work when a crisis requires it.
Calling this a "completely private healthcare system" is a bit misleading.
The assets are privately owned. That’s completely private.
It’s not laissez faire. But those are different things. Subsidies and buying mandates are compatible with total privatisation, something often lost in this debate.
> The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan up to 8% of their personal income.
So some huge portion is state-subsidized for lower incomes.
Medicare advantage in the US has similar privitisation aspects as well.