It's obviously fine for those who have it or can afford it. The argument is not about whether or not Silicon Valley software engineers can live with private healthcare. The argument that we here in Europe tend to make is that every inhabitant of a country is entitled to that excellent healthcare, nomatter who they are.
I lived in 2 European countries with amazing healthcare systems available for free or almost free but had either: amazingly long waiting times (measured in years) for anything but the most basic interventions OR an amazingly difficult process to get referred by your GP into any specialist care (GP generally recommends paracetamol and rest for everything).
So while the US has an overall broken system, as a highly-paid engineer with private employer-sponsored health insurance in the US you might be more likely to access the high quality healthcare you need.
In Europe you can still pay for private treatment, if you're highly paid you can still get that fast treatment. It's just by default you don't need to worry about it. The wait times only affect those who can't or don't want to pay. That is a choice they make.
Can you share specifics backing up your point please?
https://www.cursor.tue.nl/en/news/2016/januari/take-a-parace...
I now live in a region where there aren't really public doctors and people demand more The consequence is that doctors almost always prescribe a bag of various antibiotics and other pills to counter the side effects just to make patients feel like they got their moneys worth.
Do you have some examples? Since the vast majority of HN people (myself included) aren't medically trained, it might be very unclear what kind of interventions you're thinking about.
For example, I would hazard a guess that something that is mostly cosmetic could be considered "basic" – but my experience is that such a thing is given a low priority (rightfully so, IMHO). Yet there's lots of urgent and non-"basic" cancer interventions that happen quickly. So I'm a bit puzzled.
Which countries would those be?
I imagine misuse of easily available medication is pretty universal.
I know this is not everyone's experience, just comparing the choices of Sw Engs.
I think I should point out that it seems like very few can afford it. This just what I seen from tv show story lines which are designed to reflect what people experience, stories on reddit/twitter, and the fact gofundme is such a large thing. Even if people have health insurance of some kind they often have deductiables that means they still need to pay for any treatment they have even if it's only a percentage, treatments can only be approved by the insurer for certain things at certain times - a company decides and not the doctor, health insurance only covers for certain things, emergencies can ruin a family, medical bankruptancy is a thing, etc.
They literally created a tv show based on the idea that a teacher with cancer needed to start selling drugs to afford it.
I'm pretty sure those with health insurance in the US pay more for theirs than I do (I live in Germany and health insurance is a legal requirement and the amount they can charge is legally limited). Yet they get less than what I do. I can just turn up at hospital and not worry about how much it's going to cost. I don't even pay attention to how much I pay for insurance and neither does anyone else I know. We just consider it another tax.
This isn't always true..
In some of these free healthcare countries you can be SOL if you get cancer or a rare condition and don't have money for the latest treatments. Here in New Zealand the wait times are so long that a lot of people just pay for private surgery/screening. My father for example was out of work for almost a year waiting for a hip operation, he irrationally thought he was getting a good deal having it publicly funded.
That is indeed a problem. How does giving up and saying "the rich or well-insured can get these things, the poor not" help in any way shape or form?
If you haven't got the money you won't be able afford those treatments in the US either and the insurance companies have caps on how much they will pay.
So for some rare cases European national health services are not better than the US.
Translates if you want to have cutting edge treatments that haven't gone through medical processes to see if they're safe. Or if the chances of the treatment working is too low.
And if you can't afford that plan?