I think all the countries with "free" healthcare end up with having absurd waiting times
This is such a common trope that the USA tradeoff is that we pay to get higher quality expedited care, but it's just not true
It’s not health-care, it’s health-don’t-care.
US healthcare is easy to access. I've used it at every economic tier and it has never been difficult to get access to proper care. It is obnoxiously expensive.
> This is why average longevity in US is declining while it is growing in other developed countries.
It's growing in most, not all of course. Britain as one example is seeing something between stagnation and decline in its life expectancy, despite their vaunted NHS. And for seven decades it has lagged increasingly behind its peers, being ahead of only the US in its peer group. Universal healthcare will only take you so far.
"Life expectancy in the UK has grown at a slower rate than comparable countries over the past seven decades, according to researchers, who say this is the result of widening inequality.
"The UK lags behind all other countries in the group of G7 advanced economies except the US, according to a new analysis of global life expectancy rankings published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
"While life expectancy has increased in absolute terms, similar countries have experienced larger increases, they wrote. In the 1950s, the UK had one of the longest life expectancies in the world, ranking seventh globally behind countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden, but in 2021 the UK was ranked 29th." [0]
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"A new analysis of global rankings of life expectancy over seven decades shows the UK has done worse than all G7 countries except the USA." [1]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/16/life-expecta...
[1] https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2023/uk-drops-new-gl...
Emergency care is typically easy to access. Non-emergency care is pretty easy to access in some places and quite inconvenient in others.
On top of that (and in conjunction with Medical Levy Surcharge) the government pushes everyone to have private health insurance, and it makes a huge difference in terms of wait times for "elective" hospital procedures (i.e. anything that won't kill you very soon).
All in all, last year I paid some AUD16k getting no medical services at all.
Paying all that you're still out of pocket for anything serious, as specialists (anesthetists, urologists, gynos, you name it) are typically charging way above Medicare standard fees and private insurance doesn't cover that completely.
[1] Sorry: 30% of Federal outlays are spent on healthcare, only some of that is part of the "budget"
There are people in the US who say "I cannot afford to go to the doctor" when they are sick; this does not happen in Australia.
That doesn't mean to say that it's as bad as in the US, but it does exist.
I'd also go out on a limb and say that there are more poor people in the USA than in Australia per capita, which might factor into how many people can't afford healthcare.
Pretty sure there are a LOT of hospitals in the US where that's an expected or short time in the ER waiting room, and once you're taken in (into a room and charges accruing) you may well wait a another hour or more before being seen by a doctor.
Note that all of these places should prioritize you if you come in with heart attack or stroke symptoms.
If you're lucky, for certain situations, the system is set up VERY well.
Other situations, not so much.
I'm happy to live in Canada, where I just don't worry about the cost of things.
Problem is most hospitals are setup to be overloaded aka "every day is a bad day" - god forbid you have some staff sitting around twiddling their thumbs! Better to just have just enough staff that the place doesn't fail.
TLDR; The US system isn’t “free” and it is still shit.