Concurrunt public and private system, it’s obviously busier with less doctors in the public system, and it’s free. Specialists too. Expect to wait six to twelve months for a specialist.

Private system is affordableish but on the expensive end, especially with complex issues. Also expect to wait six months for a specialist, in complex cases twelve months is not unheard of.

Medications get capped at $30, unless the government doesn’t agree it’s a useful med, then you pay full price.

I open Google, search “am I gonna die”, and if it says probably not, then I ignore whatever it is and hope it goes away. And if it says I am, then I wait for the end to come.

Healthcare is all free to the patient (the one caveat being a small, fixed charge for prescription medication - which is free for some groups), all paid for via national taxes based on wealth. UK.

If we need a specialist Doctor, we are referred to one. There’s no money involved for the patient whatsoever.

Attaching an unaffordable fee to healthcare would be a clear barrier for anyone who is not upper class, and this would be seen as deeply discriminatory and thus unacceptable.

In the UK the cost of healthcare is included in a tax called National Insurance, it’s about 10% of wages. It can be thought of mostly as emergency use only. Mental health and minor ailments are not treated. If you want that kind of service you need to go private and most people cannot afford that so they go untreated. I know a newly qualified doctor who cannot find a job despite there being a shortage of doctors.

On the plus side, we do have a brand new aircraft carrier and a royal family.

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Rural Guatemala and it’s mostly done through mobile doctors because it’s so remote. We have universal healthcare on paper but the government spends so little on it that the resources are awful and private care tends to be a lot better and trustworthy.

In Vietnam - an awful system where nothing works. Have to pay for private healthcare where docs have dubious education.

I guess I’ll give a non-horror story account from the US. My wife and I are fortunate to be on a good insurance plan though my work, we pay about $200/month total for the both of us out of pocket, and my work covers the rest.

Were on an HMO plan, so basically we have a fair bit of restrictions on which doctors we can see, and finding a new primary is always a pain.

On the brightside, medical care for us genuinely is cheap as hell (besides the insurance cost, ofc). My wife recently cut her hand in the kitchen and we had to rush her to urgent care to get stitches. We didn’t pay anything at the time, and got a bill in the mail for $20 the next month, and that was pretty much it.

We’ve never (thankfully) had any major medical issues that need treating though, so hard to say how something like that would play out in reality.

All that being said, if I lost my job, or if my job decided they wanted to cheap out I health insurance and I was - for some reason or another - unable to get a better job, then I’d be fucked. So don’t misconstrue any of this as an argument against universal Healthcare, just because it works well for me personally

I walk into the emergency ward, take a number, give my id to a clerk, sit down and browse reddit Lemmy for a couple hours, see a doc, get some treatment if needed, and leave with a prescription, maybe a referral, and probably a parking ticket.

Canada, eh?

In the US with private insurance. I basically just go online, search for providers in my insurance’s network, and then check a different list of different procedures and their costs according to my insurance. Sometimes it’s $30 if I’m seeing my main doctor, $30 for a specialist, $40 for urgent care, $0 for a specific telehealth provider, 20% for an ER visit etc. The main thing I genuinely like about my plan is that the monthly out-of-pocket price cap for generic medications is pretty low. That being said, I know a few people who pay $0 for 90% of what they need with everything else being cheap

With good insurance, I mostly just pay the copay. I do not have good insurance.

Late but USA, wanted to share a personal experience. While at work I collapsed and had to take an ambulance to the hospital. I got sent the bills for everything. Including the ambulance ride. I stayed in the hospital overnight for observation. They couldn’t figure out what happened and I didn’t have symptoms anymore so I was discharged. Whole event cost maybe $500.

Here’s the kicker, I work(ed) as a paramedic for the ambulance company that transported me. I had insurance that was not from the company so prices were reasonable relative to what one would expect in the country. Had I been insured through work, well, the insurance provided by the company doesn’t cover transport by that company’s ambulance.

It’s Private (need insurance) but regulated by the government to ensure prices are fair and there is a fallback for people with low income.

Romania you pay taxes from your salary or if you are a student then you are automatically covered. To access specialists you need a piece of paper from your designated doctor that confirms from him/her that you need a specialist.

The reality tho is that the state of the medical system is bad. Understaffed and equipment older then 40+ years.

Australia has a hybrid system with both public and private health care. You can pay for private insurance (like in the USA) if you want to, which covers the costs for private hospitals, better doctors, etc, or you can just use the public system which is funded by a 2% income tax. My family couldn’t afford private health care when I was growing up, so we only used the public system. It was mostly okay, although regular doctors (a general practitioner or “GP”; what you’d call a “primary care physician” in the USA) always had long queues to see them. Sometimes I had to wait 3 or 4 hours to see a doctor. Some specialists have a long wait time of several months or even a year. I did have to go to hospital a few times, which is completely ‘free’ (taxpayer-funded) if you go to a public hospital.

The public system today isn’t quite as good as it used to be due to various cuts over the years, but it’s still a good safety net to have.

Australia also uses a single-payer system for prescription medication, called the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. All prescription medications are government-subsidised, with the government being the only entity that negotiates prices for the entire country. It means they have a lot of bargaining power, and a lot of medications are significantly cheaper than in other countries that don’t use a single-payer system. Medications that are hundreds of dollars list price in the USA are often less than $20 list price in Australia. Insulin is around $8 retail in Australia compared to ~$100 in the USA.

Now I live in the USA and my insurance is pretty good (flat fees of $10 for doctor visits, $20 for urgent care, $100 for emergency room, max $5 for generic medications, maximum $2000 out of pocket per year after which everything is 100% covered), but it varies a lot. Health insurance is often tied to your employer, so if you work at a “better” company, they tend to have higher-end insurance coverage. There’s been some attempts at introducing universal health care (most notably the Affordable Care Act, nicknamed “Obamacare”) but there’s a surprising number of people that don’t want it because “they’ll have to pay for other people’s healthcare”, even though it’ll actually make their health care cheaper too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯