>I did some work with a university that sent a lot of grad students to Europe. It was always fun watching the fantasy that Europe has everything figured out crash and burn.
Health care is an example of this. Having Canada and the UK, the foreign countries Americans are most familiar with, both have single-payer systems (and the UK also having a monolithic delivery system, and Canada more or less outlawing private health insurance) with zero cost on delivery for most care gives Americans a distorted view of healthcare in other developed countries. There's really no meaningful definition of "universal health care" that excludes the US post-Obamacare while including (say) Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. All three countries are like the US in a) mandating having some form of coverage, and b) having said coverage come from a variety of public and private sources.
Or copays and deductibles. In France, the normal reimbursement for care is 70%, much like that of a US high-deductible plan. Paying for ambulance rides in Switzerland is the norm, not the exception. But a comment on Reddit by an American complaining about how he had to pay for being taken to a hospital in an ambulance and how this wouldn't happen anywhere else will get 10,000 upvotes even though such a statement wouldn't necessarily be true outside Canada and the UK. To put another way, the Canada/UK model of single-payer and 100% free on delivery (much less the UK model of monolithic everything else) is, in their own ways, aberrations, with much of the developed world using mixed public/private models with meaningful cost on delivery that would not be unfamiliar to an American.
Health care is an example of this. Having Canada and the UK, the foreign countries Americans are most familiar with, both have single-payer systems (and the UK also having a monolithic delivery system, and Canada more or less outlawing private health insurance) with zero cost on delivery for most care gives Americans a distorted view of healthcare in other developed countries. There's really no meaningful definition of "universal health care" that excludes the US post-Obamacare while including (say) Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. All three countries are like the US in a) mandating having some form of coverage, and b) having said coverage come from a variety of public and private sources.
Or copays and deductibles. In France, the normal reimbursement for care is 70%, much like that of a US high-deductible plan. Paying for ambulance rides in Switzerland is the norm, not the exception. But a comment on Reddit by an American complaining about how he had to pay for being taken to a hospital in an ambulance and how this wouldn't happen anywhere else will get 10,000 upvotes even though such a statement wouldn't necessarily be true outside Canada and the UK. To put another way, the Canada/UK model of single-payer and 100% free on delivery (much less the UK model of monolithic everything else) is, in their own ways, aberrations, with much of the developed world using mixed public/private models with meaningful cost on delivery that would not be unfamiliar to an American.