Overinflated imaginary cost*
There is no way that a medical consultation of 15 minutes actually cost $32k. Examples like this are aplenty, but only from the US. My favourite one was an itemised bill for birth that included a $1k for skin contact with the newborn.
America is not special, we've just brainwashed our less-observant citizens into believing that solutions the entire rest of the world uses will never and can never work here. There's nothing special about our population or economy that would prevent accessible healthcare. The only thing standing in our way is healthcare companies who want their 6000% cut of every procedure and politicians who will do literally anything to give billionaires another dollar.
I think, it's only the Asian countries who have got cheap, easy, and effective healthcare where you can not only get appointments quickly but you can get treatment for cheap too but their emergency services are not always as streamlined as those in more developed systems. There is no clear overall winner. Some places excel in certain aspects. Others perform better in different areas.
Is that true for a median-wage earning person?
Waiting times for appointments and procedures can very widely in the US. Approvals to get needed treatments can also be denied for seemingly flimsy reasons in the US as well.
A lot of countries are likely clear overall losers though.
This is only done for very specialized treatments where the province (they run the health care delivery) doesn’t have the treatment and/or the American resource is closer than a Canadian treatment location.
For example Nova Scotia will send some complex paediatric cases to Boston. They could send them to Toronto, but Boston is closer. Same with Manitoba but they use Minneapolis.
Canada is only 40m people and almost half that is in one province. The smaller provinces simply don’t have the population to justify having every possibly medical bell and whistle.
Point is when province sends Canadians for US treatment is isn’t actually about better quality as not all provinces have the same in house capacity and often the next largest city with such capacity is an American city.
(Sigh...) Let's put some facts.
Infant mortality and under-five mortality rate (U5MR) are one of best simple indicators of the quality of healthcare. USA's mortality is x3 (!!!) of the countries on top. This puts USA around place 50 in the world, worse than Russia...
1. The quality is high.
2. The OP pays the full price.
1 is incorrect. The OP is paying a lot, but is getting the same subpar quality healthcare as everyone else. He differs with people without money in only one thing: the latter don't get the full access to the subpar health system. The system itself is the same and its general quality is well indicated by the core metric of the infant mortality.
The health system is subpar and there is absolutely no reason why such a system should cost that much.
This is less true than it used to be.
You obviusly dont insure a family of 5 and I suspect dont actually use the healthcare system.