Heavy question, I know. This is not intended to be political, please leave “taxes/government evil” out of it, I’m interested in a pragmatic view.
Infamously the US has mostly private health care, but we also have Medicare and -aid, the ACA, and the VA.
Most other nations have socialized health care in some format. Some of them have the option to have additional care or reject public care and go fully private.
Realistically, what are the experiences with your country’s health care? Not what you heard, not what you saw in a meme, not your “OMG never flying this airline again” story that is the exception while millions successfully complete uneventful and safe journey story. I’m also not interested in “omg so-and-so died waiting for a test/specialist/whatever”. All systems have failures. All systems have waits for specialists unless you’re wealthy, and wealth knows no borders. All systems do their best to make sure serious cases get seen. It doesn’t always work, but as a rule they don’t want people dying while waiting.
Are the costs in taxes, paycheck withholding (because some people pay for social health care out of paychecks but don’t call it a tax), and private insurance costs worth it to you?
In Malaysia, we have private and public healthcare. We also have public hospital and clinic, where the first one will have specialist and bed and operating theatre and all those equipment, while clinic is a smaller medical center used to give medical attention for smaller issue(flu, vaccination, treat minor wound, pediatric checkup, that sort of thing).
While it’s not free, it’s super cheap and affordable by basically everyone. The downside of it is it’s always full and the waiting list for non-urgent operation is rather long. Last i went for dentist, i paid rm3(rm2 for registration and rm1 for the work, add up to not even a dollar) for both registration and patching my teeth, where private dentist will charge upward of rm80 to rm120 just for a simple tooth filling. That’s at least 26 times more expensive! The downside though, i’m only allowed to do one hole per visit, i got two slightly chipped teeth and one tooth causing me pain, so i have to pick the important one. which is understandable since it will take forever for a single patient if they want to do it at once, making the long line even longer.
I’m always glad public healthcare exists in my developing country, even when it’s underfunded and overcrowded and not the best of experience and i barely use it, but visiting once convinced me that all country need it, it’s a universal basic human right. I’ve heard countless stories that treatment that will normally cost rm10k and above is slashed down to rm1, though i also heard a lot of stories that sometimes it takes an upward of 6 months for simple operation because the doctors just can’t keep up with the amount of works they have to do. It’s a solvable issue though, and one can also use private healthcare for their need if they have the money.
On top of that, in Malaysia the government also have mandatory employees health insurance that employer need to pay for, so if anything happened at work place or when an employees traveling for work and something happened, they are eligible for getting insurance payout on top of free medical treatment.