N H Yes?

Long, inconclusive post alert. The UK has free healthcare. Free. Like $0 (or I guess £) to see a doctor. Nothing. No co-pays, no enrollment, no insurance, no broken ACA websites. You just go to a doctor, and then you get medical help. Completely and totally free. Oh, minus the £7-something surcharge for any prescription. £7. But no-cost comes with a cost. People say time is money, and the NHS often leaves people waiting weeks, usually months to see a doctor. Now this is all relative, as they say the system is based on triage, so the more serious cases get seen faster. However, working in a mental hospital that sees some of the most severe psychiatric cases in the country and hearing the patients be told that it could be 4-6 months before they get treatment is...weird. So that begs the question, do people in the US pay for efficiency and resources? Consider: does having the choice of what health insurance you buy mean you're choosing the practices with the shorter waiting lists? The better doctors? Insurance doesn't influence that. What insurance does influence is the doctors' incentives to withhold-or worse, prescribe-certain treatments. Wee, this means I can hop from doctor to doctor, racking up enough high-dose painkillers to open a pharmacy. Do I get better? Probably not. The one thing I can fault the NHS for is the cutthroat nature it inspires for receiving treatment. Perhaps this is out of necessity, but I have seen doctors lie and families move house, just to improve a child's chances of receiving funding for treatment. Reason being that without NHS funding, the out of pocket cost of said treatment is simply not feasible. Which brings me back to the original question of US health insurance. When I was unemployed for a month, I paid out of pocket for health insurance because the alternative of covering the full costs if god forbid something happened in that month would bankrupt me. So rather than risk that, I paid $480-during a month of no income-for the security that if something did happen, I'd just have a measly $10 co-pay. Now, let me reiterate that the comparable alternative over here is FREE HEALTHCARE. Pay a lot or pay $500 vs. pay a lot or pay NOTHING. And oh yeah, there's this thing here called Bupa, also known as private health insurance. It's still cheaper than the US. Sung to an entirely different tune, I went to see the NHS occupational health team at my hospital, and they were out of band aids. THEY WERE OUT OF BANDAIDS. I thought like rule #1 of a doctors office is always have band aids? Then again, I did get offered a free vaccine. After I corrected the nurse that she was in fact looking at the wrong patient's chart on the computer. And reminding her that I was there to have said vaccination rather than just a TB skin test. And getting my hepB jab on unsteralised skin...maybe I have been spending too much time working in an OCD clinic. Anyway, the jury's still out for debate, but so far, I think the NHS gets a big N-H-YES. Also people here make fun of American healthcare like a LOT. So maybe I'm just embarrassed. Aren't we supposed to have the best, like, everything? Isn't England full of like, Socialists...and stuff?