I am speaking from the UK where, of course, we have a centuries-long rivalry / semi humourous dislike of the French. Nevertheless we respect the French healthcare system as being on a par with our own.
As you know, Britain is often described as "socialist" in the USA. And compared to say Republicans, we are. One feature of this is universal health care. I've heard that about 15% of Americans have no health cover (though an American doctor friend tells me Medicare... or is it Medicaid... will pay for basics but woe betide you if you turn out to have any assets). Anyhow Americans seem to fear sickness much more than us. We have higher taxes, but it's like insurance - for example a few months ago my wife had some heart palpitations. So we went to the Accident & Emergency ward of the nearest hospital - about 10 miles away
- and were seen immediately (no queue, we were lucky I think) by a nurse, a couple of minutes later a doctor, then a bit later by another doctor. They decided blah blah blah, and we left. No charges, minimal paperwork, it's a *right* for British citizens. Next to us an old lady had been taken in by ambulance - she'd been feeling faint, I got the impression she was very poor and hadn't been eating properly for too long, so they were going to keep her in and feed her up for a few days. You don't pay for seeing doctors here. Well you can; you can go private; because the NHS [National Health Service] can't have infinite doctors, so for non-critical stuff you can sometimes find there is a waiting list of a few months for the free hip replacement or whatever. So some people go private for that. Dentists are generally not free (not sure about the details there).
So how much does this compulsory insurance cost? Apparently (source: a book by Tim Harford, "the Undercover Economist") on average, about half what US care costs. The reason is economies of scale. With private health schemes like US ones, the insurers can cherry-pick the members and discourage / balance risky ones with high fees. Also when you get treatment it's not necessarily the best, it's the most cost-effective. Whilst there's an element of that here, the government funds the NHS and they have hundreds of scanners, specialists in obscure fields and so on all over the UK. EVERYONE pays and the NHS cannot turn you away or increase your premium because you are a haemophiliac. If I have an unusual condition, I might have to travel 150 miles to get to a "centre of excellence", but it's free when I get there.
How about other European countries? They're pretty socialist too. France's NHS is at least as good as ours. (They have notoriously high taxes too!) I think Germany's is too. And if I go on holiday in the EU... I take my NHS membership card with me and if I get ill in, say, Spain, I can use their NHS. For free. They bill the UK NHS. Of course, god help you if you fall ill in a low-resource country like Greece, but you'll get the same treatment the locals do.
One of my family went to the USA to work with animals recently. They got a rabies shot before going. It cost £90 (maybe $120?). Apparently it would have cost $1000 in the USA.
If you get ill and have infinite money... then the USA is the best place to be. Best doctors, most advanced equipment, etc. But if you are a normal professional, you'll probably find Europe more, uh, cost-efficient.
Naturally there are local specialisms. France has more specialists, and thus shorter waiting lists, for bone stuff, I think. A lot of people fly to Eastern Europe and get cheap cosmetic surgery there (not sure about the wisdom of that - sometimes it goes wrong and they get it fixed by the British NHS, to the annoyance of the rest of us).
To give you some idea of the cost of all this, the British NHS is meant to be the largest employer in the world after the Chinese Army. (Not sure that's true, but it's the kind of statistic some people quote occasionally.)
[According to Tim Harford, by the way, the most economically efficient
/ "best" health care system in the world is Singapore's, which uses a combined public / private system. You get core stuff that anyone can fall ill from the public bit. You also get some credit to put towards a private scheme, so if your family has a history of heart trouble you might join a scheme specialising in that.]
Before you all rush over to Europe, remember it's NOT the same culture and little things like assumptions about how, say, car insurance works can trip you up (as happened to a Polish guy I knew - it's all about knowing what questions to ask). Take the way our courts work when you sue someone. It's not particularly connected to healthcare but it illustrates how radically different we can be - but because no one mentions it, few realise the other side of the Pond works differently. In the UK, if I sue you and I lose... I pay YOUR lawyer fees and court costs as well as my own. So even if I have a "no win, no fee" arrangement with my own lawyer, it's likely to bankrupt me if the court case is long and complex. This makes Brits much less likely to frivolously sue you than Americans. We have far fewer lawyers as a result! French courts work completely different to either US or UK courts, being based on an inquisitorial system rather than adversarial - something to do with Napoleon - but I digress.
Hope you enjoyed this little cultural discussion. Now back to the electronics... anyone know whether Live or Neutral hurts more? 8)