She said when you go to a hospital or medical office in Europe they generally look like an American junior high school. When you go to a hospital in the US, they often look like a resort hotel, especially the new ones. Such amenities are unrelated (or even counter-indicative) to the quality of medical care provided. The average European receives better care on average.

This also resonates with one area of my own medical care experience here in America: dentistry. My current dentist operates out of a modest office in an old strip mall in an unglamorous part of town. No fancy monitors hovering over every dental chair. No efforts to upsell me on cosmetics or prescriptions every visit. Just solid reliable affordable dental care.

I recognized in retrospect an anxious subtle almost subliminal feeling I would get whenever I walked into most dental offices before finding my current dentist. All these fancy state-of-the-art amenities, the giant saltwater aquarium, who knows how much in loans to pay off for a newly graduated dentist: somebody's gotta pay for these niceties somehow.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out the majority of patients were, unfortunately, impressed and reassured by such superfluities.