Yes, well, that's the point here, isn't it? The USA resists going the way of Socialism...because it doesn't work in addition to being immoral. Canadians talk about their health system as though it is the ultimate, but it actually isn't working and is no more sustainable than the British model that is on the verge of collapse with the authorities saying, outright, that they simply will not take care of tens of thousands of people that they are supposed to be insuring.
In the UK there has been all sorts of talk over the years of restricting NHS treatment to varying groups of people.
The most obvious group to demonise are smokers because, well, you'd have to be living under a rock to not know that smoking causes all sorts of Very Bad Things to happen to your body. So we should punish the nasty smokers who are stupid enough to suffer these self-inflicted conditions by refusing them treatment. But there's a small issue there, namely that smokers pay far more in taxes on tobacco than they cost the NHS. Never mind, who cares about facts when you've got public money to save?
The next group is fat people. You know, the stupid ones who eat too much and move around too little. The ones too busy stuffing their pie holes with garbage to care about the damage it causes their bodies and the amount of money it costs to treat them. Stupid fat people, no knee replacements for you because your problem is self inflicted. I thought that one was great, as a fat person myself I was looking forward to my tax reduction in lieu of the services I wouldn't be getting. Wait, I was going to get a reduction in tax to correspond to the reduction in service, right? No, of course not. Silly me.
As with so much else the NHS was a really good idea when it was formed. It really doesn't say much for a society when people are pretty much left to die because they can't afford to be treated for conditions that are easy to treat. But then the NHS was expected to cover more and more and more and, as with most things governments get their hands on, it became a political football to be used whenever it was convenient. Any time the government wanted to cut spending the howling started about closing schools and hospitals - needless to say the government is very slow to cut their own levels of waste, their own "fact-finding missions" to exotic locations at public expense (flying first class, obviously) and their own perks and benefits.
In the UK the NHS is constantly trying to come up with more money, so now you get to pay to park at the hospital. Good luck with that - firstly you have to find a space (not always easy), then you have to pay for parking. In many hospitals you have to pay in advance, with nothing more than a best guess how much time you need. If your appointment is late, you have to decide whether to wait it out and hope you don't get a parking fine or towed away, or duck out to buy another parking ticket and hope you're not classified as a missed appointment if you aren't there when they call for you. At least some appointments are missed because patients are simply unable to find a space at the hospital and aren't in any condition to walk from the nearest space they can find. Even having a disabled badge is no guarantee of finding a space within a mile of the hospital. The parking is enforced by an outside company and they generally don't care that your appointment ran late - you overstayed your ticket so you get a fine.
Being largely a political football the NHS is also pulled in multiple directions. If the government refuses to fund a treatment like gender realignment they are immediately accused of being hostile to the LGBT community. If they refuse to fund IVF then they are hostile to hard-working couples. For good measure the way the NHS is organised means that different regions can set their own rules, creating what is often called a "postcode lottery" and strange geographic wrinkles where one couple can't get IVF funded while the couple one street away can, because the boundary between health authorities happens to run between the two houses.
It is good to know that you won't get a hideous bill after receiving treatment. When my father thought he was having a heart attack he called an ambulance that took him to hospital to be checked over (thankfully it turned out he hadn't had a heart attack at all) and didn't have to stop and think about whether he could come up with several thousand to pay the assorted bills. That's an area where the US system needs a lot of improvement. On the other hand having seen some of the utter uselessness elsewhere within the NHS (like the time my wife was expected to walk to the far end of the hospital for an X-ray, when she had a suspected broken foot), and the terrifying rate of hospital-acquired infections, there's clearly a lot of scope for the UK system to be improved.
