Australian here, same opinion. It seems, watching from afar, that the american public is somehow being convinced that free health care is impossible. We have fr

Australian here, same opinion. It seems, watching from afar, that the american public is somehow being convinced that free health care is impossible. We have free health care here and there are some issues here and there but in general it works and is not burdensome tax wise. If you want you can pay additional for private insurance and get private coverage in private hospitals, which means a room to yourself and so on, and you can choose your doctor. In the public system you get the doctor available, but when it comes to specialists, they're the same doctors usually, because there's only so many specialists. Recent experience - my daughter sprained her ankle, so went to the hospital for x-rays. I live outside the city so the doctor we saw was coincidentally our local GP. The price $0, time waited - about half an hour, this was on a Sunday night. One thing that may be a factor here is the medical practices are run by doctors - no professional manager people which, from what I understand, seem to be in the US health system. The doctors, in general, really are people who want to make people well and thats what they do. Sure they like to make a buck and they do but not at the expense of everyone else. If you let non medical people into the system to manage it then, I'd look closely at their motives, I suspect you'll find sometimes their motives aren't pure.