It's not like you can get whatever, whenever medical care in Europe. Whether private or public, the entity that's paying the bills will be making decisions on what procedures are or are not "necessary" and how much they will pay.
My uncle in Denmark had cancer, and they basically put him in a hospice-type facility to die, because anything else would have not been justified due to his age, the cost, and the low probability of success.
In the USA, he or his family would likely have demanded aggressive surgery and/or chemo or radiation, he would have died anyway, and there would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars of "medical debt" created.
I suspect many people who like the idea of socialized medicine are not prepared for the reality of the limits on care that would bring, particularly for the old and terminally ill.
> In the USA, he or his family would likely have demanded aggressive surgery and/or chemo or radiation
In the US, if you can't afford it, medical care basically isn't even an option. If you have a lot of money, then you're set. In Europe if you don't have much money, you at least have some options, and if you have a lot of money, you can still go to the US. Or if you're open to $100k's of debt, you could've easily gone to the US for treatment, too. Your scenario just proves my point that the situation is way better in europe
Well, I'm saying that he had no options. He went to a (very nice) facility to die. They kept him comfortable and relatively pain-free.
Any other option he had, should he have wished to pursue it, would have been outside of the Danish social medical system.
That may be "better" than what would have happened in the USA under Medicare/Medicaid, but my point was there really wasn't a choice in the matter for him. He didn't have to pay for it, other than the taxes he paid his whole life, so I guess there's that.
> Well, I'm saying that he had no options. He went to a (very nice) facility to die. They kept him comfortable and relatively pain-free
I'm just saying that's an option that he took. Just because it wasn't ideal, doesn't mean it wasn't something. If he was in the US, that wouldn't have been an option in the first place. Still a massive improvement over the US.
My uncle in Denmark had cancer, and they basically put him in a hospice-type facility to die, because anything else would have not been justified due to his age, the cost, and the low probability of success.
In the USA, he or his family would likely have demanded aggressive surgery and/or chemo or radiation, he would have died anyway, and there would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars of "medical debt" created.
I suspect many people who like the idea of socialized medicine are not prepared for the reality of the limits on care that would bring, particularly for the old and terminally ill.