You can always buy private medical insurance to give you fast access to specialists for non-urgent care, or it can be provided through your work, in exactly the

You can always buy private medical insurance to give you fast access to specialists for non-urgent care, or it can be provided through your work, in exactly the same way as the American system. The difference between America and somewhere like the UK is that in the UK expensive private medical insurance is optional, and there is a baseline of decent medical care available to everyone. And that baseline universal care is provided for the same amount of taxpayer spending (as a percentage of GDP) as the US spends on providing Medicare, Medicaid, and those partial programmes. The US spends about 8% of GDP on private medical care, and another 8% on public care. Universal healthcare is about making the public, taxpayer-funded part of that expenditure more efficient, not about abolishing the private part of it.