That's it. No open enrollment, no surprise bills, no trying to figure out which ppo or hmo works best, no wondering if it's in network or not or any of that BS.
And to call it out in a thread where someone has literally shared that they're forced to attend a pointless appointment at an exorbitant cost like that isn't itself some form of wasteful bureaucracy. But if the time and money is going to a corporation instead of the government it's better :/
At this point, China is doing capitalism better than us in its consumer industries. They actually have real competition, so fierce at times that the government worries about what it calls “involution”, or destructive competition (which Marx predicted as the end state of capitalism). Of course, its healthcare system is not run through capitalist competition like its consumer industries; it is fully state managed.
Some real competition might actually help if we’re going to keep pretending to be capitalists. Or we could move from socialism for the rich to socialism for the people. I don’t really care which as long as we move on from the current dysfunctional system.
NHS experience: you might have to wait two weeks to see the doctor, and it will be a ten minute appointment. (Which in this case might be fine.) If you can use a nurse things tend to be much easier.
But everything else (eg. discussing blood test results, medication reviews, mental health issues) will get dumped into the "routine" appointment bucket and, yes, will often take 1-2 weeks.
You do hear occasional horror stories about the triage process, but my experience has been pretty reasonable. For example, I lost my voice last year but had no other symptoms - so I expected to have to wait a few days to be seen. But I was treated as an urgent case since it affected my ability to work, and got an appointment that afternoon.