How about this? Would you rather be in the US, or Japan, for such an emergency? Japan costs half as much as the US per capita (with even lower out of pocket costs), and beats us by every other measure. I'd rather be in the Japanese system than the American one for anything.

edit: The Japanese system, structurally, is very similar to the American system. It's not socialized, by and large. Private insurance through employers to private providers. Yet it costs half as much and works better. This points to something broken in the US system at a deeper level. Expanding on this, every civilized nation in the world has health care more or less on par with the US (fuck exceptionalism), for more or less half our cost. To the chagrin of liberals, "socialized medicine" isn't the obvious solution, because a lot of systems no more socialist than ours work well. And to the chagrin of conservatives, a lot of highly socialized systems also work better. The American system is uniquely fucked up.

Back to Japan. The key difference I can see between the two systems is that Japan has strict price controls. A government commission sets the prices for all medical products and services covered by insurance, with an eye to controlling costs while maintaining profitability. Insurers and providers have to control their costs internally, rather than jacking prices or doing many-to-many negotiations. Is this the key?