It's cognitive dissonance. They have not experienced a quality public health care first hand, so they cannot admit that it works without contradicting their core economical beliefs.
It's not cognitive dissonance (unless on the part of public-health-is-better folks). Its a different metric. If cost is the only measure, then sure, 3 week wait for a free aspirin is 'good'. If its timeliness, then other systems win hands down.
NHS triage is pretty effective: stuff that might actually kill you gets seen to immediately. Chronic conditions get managed long-term. The vast majority of the long waits are for things like hip operations, which will improve quality of life but aren't particularly urgent.
The US system is not without waits: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/sunday-review/long-waits-...
The latter.
In this case, the system which can get urgent attendance to all users wins over the one which does it only for a subset, even in terms of timeliness.
A system than turns non-urgent care (a cold or the flu) into urgent care (pneumonia) is going to 'stuff the ballot box' in its favor however.
- a) one where you would be randomly assigned to one of two groups: one which gets timely attendance for urgent and non-urgent needs; and the other one which gets no attendance at all, of any kind.
- b) one where all users get attended with an equal 3 weeks delay for non-urgent needs, and 0 delay for urgent needs.
> if you have something not risky you have wait-times for exams of 1-3 weeks
In Canada that's closer to 3-6 months.
> if you have ANYTHING risky there is no wait time, you get your exams and surgeries asap the same day if needed
In Canada, average wait times in emergency rooms are 20+ hours.