People may not know what this means so I'll spell it out for you: a baby born three months premature to a drug-addled mother is very unlikely to survive. In the U.S., that baby will be treated and damn the cost. In most other countries, that baby will be scored as a miscarriage (i.e. not the hospital's fault) if it dies. It receives care accordingly.
You know the saying "We only improve what we measure?" Many countries do not measure the healthcare of severely premature infants.
This is a good thing to keep in mind the next time you hear about "rationing", because this difference is the rationing that dare not speak its name. After all, if they're not acknowledged to be human quite yet, then if you withhold care to them it isn't rationing.
A quick anecdote: my friend and I here were laughing because in both cases our pregnant wives went to the doctor about a small concern and were put in the hospital for a week for testing. But I thought about it later, and that wouldn't happen in America. You're churned out as fast as possible. The great side effect, and I think you'll see this on infant mortality rates as well, despite what you've said, is that if health care is free, people use it earlier than the crisis point. And that's cheaper and better for everyone.
Or rather, it saves money for the individual who has something worthy of being prevented. For that person, it's much easier to find something and/or prevent it early rather than wait until it gets serious. This is why prevention seems like such a common sense thing.
For society at large, however, testing and servicing all of the other people -- the people who never will get the thing you're trying to prevent -- ends up spending more than the treating person who got it later.
It's one of those things that sounds good when you say it, but the statistics don't back it up.
But it's not more expensive. Most European countries spend much less on health care, but much more on prevention. It's very effective, and at the end of the day, it's really what medicine is about.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/540199
...After all the consequences are accounted for, very few services of any kind save more money than the cost incurred. Childhood vaccines are among the rare examples that actually are cost-saving...
Of course, there's more to universal health care than just saving money. Once you politicize it, it's more about doing and saying things to keep those votes coming in.
Not sure about "everyone covered" part because in other Eastern Europe countries if you don't pay in cash nobody is looking at you. I don't believe the Czech are more advanced.
The official "coverage" is a myth. If you are over 60 better don't go in hospital because the "policy" is to increase the mortality rate. Why - because the government do not have to pay the pension. Don't believe it? My wife is talking with her mother every Saturday by the phone and I know how it is.
Do you believe a simple over the counter medicine for arthritis is considered a miracle there? This is what many people here in US do not know - here in US we have the best medications that are really effective when compared with medications from other countries.
The technology - this is beyond comparison - for example the scanners - in Eastern Europe there is 1 scanner to probably 1 mil people.
These are the facts I have from personal experience.
These low immigration, long industrialized European nations are NOT comparable to the US as a whole. Huge swathes of the US were borderline feudal agriculture all of 80 years ago. The populations are very different and it has nothing to do with health care.