- negotiate with the government on prices, or
- work for the government, charging their rates.
Waiting lists for specialists are ridiculous, unless it's something extremely urgent. It quickly becomes about "who you know" and queues can be jumped if you have the inside track.
I've never been encouraged or "nudged" to get a physical or even blood work done. Quite frankly, the system is under so much strain that getting everyone a physical would push it over the brink. So they mandate them for commercial drivers and other high-risk occupations, and everyone else just goes to medi-clinics and sees a walk-in doctor. Zero continuity of care.
Canada is great at treating the dying, terrible at treating the healthy.
I'm self-employed. Dental, prescription drugs, glasses, mental health: this is all out of pocket.
My impression is that if you have a reasonably good job in the United States, you have access to reasonable health care. Is that a fair assessment?
I see no difference between private insurance and government run except the government is constantly lambasted for overspending and medicare seems to have the lowest operating costs and payouts to healthcare providers.
which seems to be the exact metric you want.
edit: just move to a public option system and watch shit hit the fan in the market.
Contrary to popular understanding, relatively low (sometimes impressively low) overhead & even fraud rates is the norm for US government social programs. This is one case where pop-culture "common knowledge" diverges wildly from reality.
Accountable is obviously relative.
BigCo at least wants one thing you know about, money, and that makes them far less capricious and far easier to deal with than government where you don't know any of the incentives that the people who (with several layers of indirection) set the KPIs for the person you are actually dealing with.
As evil as they are I'll take Comcast over some random state org any day.
Having a public option as a backstop would probably be good but I don't think I want a public option that covers routine stuff, GP visits, a broken bone. Stuff with a well bounded upper limit like that tends to be handled well by private insurance so long as there's competition (see auto insurance for example).