And the businessman said, "Gotcha. Now imagine your doctor telling you that you have a disease and in order to continue to live this carefree life, you need a million dollars for the surgery..."
Together with millions of other highly specialized and trained people that effectively pay for the social safety net?
I can only speak for my own country - but becoming a doctor is highly attractive here in spite of it being hard work.
Nurses, not that attractive, but they are paid a decent middle class salary as compensation for the hard work.
Also, there's good stress and bad stress. Treating someone with an acute cardiac arrest is probably quite stressful, but also very meaningful. Dealing with your boss having an 'episode' and needs some slide set reworked by 12 o'clock is stressful but also pretty devoid of any larger meaningful purpose.
I see the tax I pay as an investment in the people and society. Society helped me get good health care and take a good education, even though I come from what would be a lower class home in much of the world. I pay that gift forward to someone else - very likely to be people in my own family.
Before you misunderstand, I am totally in favour of universal healthcare, my country (India) has it. Pretty sure if we can afford it with a population of our size, the wealthy nations sure can.
Universal healthcare systems, at the moment, have very bad supply/demand problem, especially in developed countries, where population getting extremely old. And it's unclear how it can be solved.
This is typical of how the US does things: other countries don't have a perfect solution, therefore we will stick with our much worse solution.
[0]: https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
Also, regarding healthcare system quality, one of related statistics from this article are in favor of US: "30-day mortality for heart attacks and strokes is lower in the U.S. than in comparable countries". Same with ischemic stroke(and it's better in US by quiet much, 4.1 vs 6.1 30-day mortality rate per 100 patients in other countries).
I guess it depends where and what and how but me and my friends experiences are very different from what you say, especially after having had experiences with private healthcare in other countries with colleagues where I was present.
CT scan (ct), RMI scan (rmi), endoscopy/colonoscopy/etc (scopes), radiography scan (radio)
Do doctors sometimes not give patients what they demand? Absolutely. But that's the way it's supposed to be - it's hard to make rational decisions when your own health, or that of a loved one, is on the line. That's why doctors consult doctors too.
But what "inadequate care" are you talking about?
If you lived in EU you would know you can't really trust public healthcare.
It's the same story everywhere: they introduce it, it works ok for a couple of years, it's a socialist success, yay... then it experiences a very sharp decline, but the government doesn't care
It just seized a good portion of private economy and they're the good guys because they pay your plasters with your tax money, no matter how shitty the service is.