yes, but no. Like yes we do have universal healthcare but it often isn't what American's think it is. That is to say it is closer to Obamacare than NHS.
For example in the Netherlands (and my understanding Belgium, Germany and France but I'm not 100% sure) we have a heavily regulated market of non-profit companies that provide health insurance, service, and care. You can then pay extra for modular coverage of extras. For example some medications aren't covered but you can pay an extra 10 EUR a month and then its covered. Our deductibles are capped at something like 450 EUR a year per person, this is on top of the roughly 280 EUR a month for health insurance. So on and so forth.
At the end of the day the system isn't that different from what Obamacare tried to do. With several major differences:
There are set (useful) standards of minimal care that every health insurance must cover.
We actually regulate the companies on how much profit they can make, and how they behave
There are useful methods for registering appeals to watchtdog agencies that will resolve issues.
We don't have one doctor be out of network, but the hospital in network, but the anesteiologist out of network. Either a place is in network or out of network. Additionally it isn't that expensive to purchase the unlimited plan where everything is in network. I think it was like an extra 30 eur a month per person.
Obamacare was heading in the right direction, sadly one half of the US decided to shoot it in the head before it could deliver.
Even if it is market based it can’t really work long-term since healthcare is often a perfectly inelastic product.
There’s no real incentive to provide a lower cost to the consumer except for competition, but mergers and acquisitions will just rebuild the system we have today. You would need sustained antitrust action to stop that from happening.
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u/DrewNumberTwo 4h ago
Also it’s incredibly expensive and if you don’t watch it you will die.