As an outsider looking in, your healthcare system is pretty shitty... How come "poor" euro countries can manage to provide a free at the point of entry health care, you must pay next to no tax or if you are, what does it go on?
To the outsider, most of your nations set prices which we don't do. Even when your people are covered by private insurance companies, those companies pay rates that have been set by the government (e.g., Switzerland). In addition to the fact that we may be somewhat less healthy because of obesity and bad eating (although you tend to smoke more), our biggest problem is runaway provider prices. Our hospitals keep building fancier and fancier hospitals out into the most affluent suburbs and our doctors tend to live higher on the hog than yours do. In addition, we subsidize you to a certain extent. We pay extremely high drug prices while yours are capped by your governments. What that means is that we are funding world-wide research and development out of our pockets.
Our insurance companies try to negotiate down prices paid to our providers, but they are not very good at it. Your governments set the prices, but we call that "socialism".
Obamacare at least has attempted to provide universal access to health care (based on the philosophy that health care coverage is more of a right than a privelege) but you can see from the comments above (e.g., on Medicaid) that Americans tend to have more of a sink or swim attitude than your countries do. We expect people to fend more for themselves.
