were you not employed by an employer that was paying your insurance premiums? Heck, when I was in california the startup I was at was paying almost my entire insurance premium.

and in practice, I'd argue I had better quality of care from that than from my socialized insurance in my current country, though the socialized care does have some benefits.

reason for better quality of care is that in the US system for all its problems, the patient is the customer as they have many options and each doctor is running an independent business. my experience with socialized medicine is that the government is really the customer, not me, and doctors are not really running independent businesses (and when they do, they aren't particularly cheap). It's like having a single HMO that gets to decide what you get with little recourse. While some might equate it to health insurance companies in the US, I, at least, felt I had much more flexibility with them.