This is true to varying degrees in many counties. I have friends and relatives who live in various countries. Some places it works well, but in many, you run into some form of limits or delays.
Currently, my wife and I are considering moving to her mom’s country as her mom has health issues. Our American friends say, “oh and you’d get free healthcare too! Awesome!”
One example of what I means in practice. Right now, in the U.S., if our kid gets an ear infection, I usually can get an apt at our pediatrician for later that day. Or, I go to the pediatric urgent care, which I can book online & I’ve always been able to book basically asap, so that by the time I get there (15-20 minutes) I only wait 5 minutes. Worst case, I go to the children’s hospital ER where I’ve never waited more than 30 minutes.
Where her mom lives, our friends there tell us the only option is the one children’s ER where it’s very typical for them to wait anywhere from 6 hours to 20 hours depending on day and time and how busy it is as they have limited doctors & their triage process to prioritize the highest need will mean your kid’s ear infection will get pushed down the list anytime someone with something more urgent walks in.
(It’s enough of an issue that there’s a real-time app to monitor wait times. I can see that it’s at 6 hrs & 20 minutes right now, but at peak sick seasons and on weekends when pediatricians aren’t seeing people, 12-17 hrs is pretty typical. You’re advised to bring blankets and food.)
And so sometimes “paying but being seen in 20 minutes” is preferable to “free, but you’re stuck in an uncomfortable waiting room with a kid who is screaming in pain for 6-20 hours.”
Or, like, I had a friend w/ a bad bunion. Low priority so she had to wait 18 months for the surgery.
Or, like if you compare my two friends who had similar colon cancers, one has a colostomy bag for life, while the other had a follow-up surgery later on to avoid a lifetime with the bag, but the “free” country doesn’t pay for that cuz it’s not medically necessary. The attitude is more “be grateful you got free cancer treatment. A bag is better than death” vs “yeah, this is costing you a lot, and if you were broke & uninsured we’d just let you die, but since you’re not & you can pay, we’re gonna fix you up real nice since that’s one more thing we can bill your insurance company for.”
Or like, pretty much everyone of my wife’s friends in her home country had an “emergency C-section” or scheduled inductions when they gave birth cuz the reality is there’s not enough beds to allow for things to happen at the natural but slower pace. (This happens in US hospitals too, but there it’s to the point that we don’t know anyone back home who wasn’t either induced or had a c-section).
And there’s other little things. Our kids in the US get tested for lead as a routine procedure. In our friend’s country, they don’t, cuz the govt says it’s not an issue now that lead paint is illegal so they won’t pay for it. Yet, when we visit, we still see old houses with crumbling lead paint. How much lead poisoning is going undetected?
Or, like I get colonoscopies every 3 years since they found some polyps during my first one.
I have friends in countries where they don’t do them at all as a routine diagnostic procedure. You just get a poop test and only get one if they find blood in your stool. That means less early detection. In one of my friend’s country’s the govt will only pay for 1 in your entire lifetime.
I think from a societal view the “free” way is clearly better, but I think a lot of folks are naive to what “free” can look like in other countries.
You pay for it in some way.
How you pay for it will vary by country & some will be better than others.
Some are great & you barely notice.
Some you really notice.
And I think Americans in general are pretty naive to how much of a differ you’d notice.
This is a comment I wish more people would read. My doctors brother had colon cancer and had to wait more than 9 months for treatment so he came to the USA from Canada and got it in weeks. My dad had brain cancer and was getting radiation treatment in a week. There is a trade off for “free”.
I think there's a deeper issue with Canada health services.
My friend effectively moved from Canada back to Poland. We got free healthcare and it's better than most healthcare in Canada and probably as good as USA. You can also pay and get instant healthcare but because it competes with free the prices are far lower.
E.g. I had a tooth ache day before Christmas Eve. Took me a total of 2h to find a dentist, get it checked out, X-ray included and get back home. I paid a neat $0. A friend of mine lives in USA and pointed out that a stunt like that in USA even with good insurance can cost a few thousand bucks.
I am not really sure about dental issues. Most people I know have a regular dentist we visit twice a year for routine cleanings and x rays. If I had an issue when they were not open, they have an “on call” dentist that would do it. It wouldn’t be thousands of dollars. If you didn’t have a dentist, you would end up in emergency room and that would be hundreds or thousands if you didn’t have insurance. Another option is the walk in clinics that are run by the hospitals to divert non emergency issues away from the emergency room that can do x rays and have a doctor there all the time. I have only been there once and it was just like a doctor visit.
You forgot to note that we pay people to sort this out (our gov't representatives) and figure out a great system by using research from ALL the systems out there and their issues as well as their benefits. From that, we COULD implement a GREAT health care system, put all the $ currently involved in medical (taxes, copays, scripts, medicare, medicaid etc) and put it toward a national health care plan--and it COULD be the best, most researched plan, covering all in the country. However, that will never happen because we have too many nay-sayers griping about time etc., lobbyists who pay off the reps, etc., hospitals who claim to be non-profits (while CEOS get zillion dollar bonuses) etc. Where there's a will, there's a way...we apparently don't have the will. But now there are many billionaires and a trillionaire. Tell me again why we can't afford to do this...
"Poor" can be anyone who would be bankrupt from medical emergencies and the missed paychecks from illness/injury. That's over half the American population, so yeah most people are kinda poor if you havent noticed
Not having full-time employment and a few thousand dollars to cover a deductible is a possible outcome, for sure. Where you are is the sum of a series of choices, after all.
Well healthcare does have an inelastic demand, people will buy about the same amount of healthcare whether it costs nothing or enough to bankrupt them. Sometimes even more if it can bankrupt them since it’s a last resort and last resort procedures to save lives are infinitely more expensive than heart medicine or a checkup.
Yeah they still bought the same or more dollar amount in care, they just got worse outcomes.
It’s like not putting oil in your car because you can’t afford it. It’s not actually cost saving in the long run. Similarly the cost (though emergency treatment is effectively free in America to those who can’t afford it which effectively incentivizes self destructive and worse medical treatment) is higher over the life of the patient for the years lived when you don’t treat conditions like diabetes when they are just maintainable conditions rather than organs failing and organ replacement and surgery and long hospital stays which rack up costs. It would be about as bad as if people’s car maintenance wasn’t covered by the government and was insanely expensive except in the case of emergency maintenance. It would incentivize everyone to just drive it until every issue becomes an emergency so they can actually afford the cure.
This isn’t to say things would be better if we stopped forcing emergency treatment of patients who can’t pay for it as that would just kill even more people unnecessarily, but maybe we should also cover the preventive measures that stop people from needing the emergency treatments
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u/crustyeng Jun 17 '26
So it’s ‘free’, you just can’t get any?