@thor Well there is two sides to my opinion.. There is the more "objective" (I will have biases like anyone else) side, which is due to my Data Science work int he health care industry.. So i have a decent sense of the failures across most of europe and why the system is trash (as is the US system of course but in different ways)... then there are my personal experiences which mostly turned out to be completely in line with what the data already told me.

The specific issues i could elucidate vary from country to country as you suggest too. Some are relatively worse than others. This tends to create a local bias where if your in a country that is relatively better than your neighbor you think you have it great and never really see the problems, they are just the norm and something that seems universal.

So one point: "and there is no questions asked about whether you're covered"

This is true in america too if we are talking about emergency services. If you go to an ER they are requried to treat you and they can not deny you treatment if you arent covered.

As for being treated by doctors, it isnt much different than in europe in the sense that if you arent covered a regular GP (general doctor) will refuse to see you if you refuse to pay. So yes much like in america you do absolutely need to be covered. It is certainly cheaper in europe though and that is one way europe has addressed a problem that america has, the pricing is better, but that comes with other costs.

The flip side of that is that the quality of care in most of europe, as well as some data privacy issues are in the trasher.

To give you an idea of my situation, I was living in the ntherlands which has one of the shortest wait times of any european country, yet their wait time is still astronomical compared to the USA. I had a spinal herniation (my disc was leaking into my spine and pressing on teh cord causing imobility and extreme pain)... There was a simple treatment that involved getting a needle in my back, took about 5 minutes to do. Problem is you couldnt schedule it ahead of time since they dont know when a needle will wear off, can be a month, can be 6, so once it starts wearing off you have to maket he appointment. since appointments were always multiple months into the future that basically meant that even though I had access to effectively a non-surgical cure it mean going 1 - 2 months in extreme torturous agony and being bed ridden every few months, all because the system was so overloaded they couldn't find the time to do a 5 minute pin prick.

Statistically speaking this is a huge problem across almost all universal and socialized healthcare countries, the wait times are enourmous and as a result cause a great deal of death and suffering that otherwise could be avoided.

The privacy issue is another, because of the nature of universal healthcare it tends to mean one of two things 1) you can not pay purely in cash and choose not to have insurance, which means you cant be anonymous your health data will be tracked and you have no control over that 2) if you are on controlled substances there is no way to avoid winding up in a database for that which may be used against you at some point in the future.

@tombies@social.tchncs.de