While private health care exists in all of those countries, and in some of them it's a significant part of the system, a lot of what exists isn't actually _for-profit_.
For instance, in Ireland we have a dual public and private system (primary care is private unless you're old, very young, or low income, private hospitals exist as an option), but most of the private system is either outright non-profit (most private hospitals, the statutory VHI health insurer) or is heavily constrained by the existence of the non-profit portion and regulation (private insurers have to compete with the VHI, and are not allowed charge risk-based rates for most customers).
another example, in Russia, you have _theoretically_ the same system, but the level of treatment covered by the mandatory insurance is totally insufficient by any reasonable modern standards, so you have to pay all the way. And it's not about debt, it's often about not getting live-saving treatment before you cash out.
The question is whether a good publicly-funded alternative should be available, to allow everyone treatment for the vast majority of conditions and illnesses that are lethal or significantly affect quality of life.
Most countries that have the latter, also turn out to have much cheaper healthcare overall.
This system doesn't solve or treat every problem, and the US system manages to provide better quality of care in some cases, but there's a serious morality issue here that it does fix. Along with many pragmatic socioeconomic benefits (e.g. healthcare for retirees, early-stage and failing entrepeneurs)
From the outside it seems that government attempts to shape the market (by the measures you mention) seem to work out worse and more expensively than measures to make the market (e.g. NHS). We have this in the UK with the government providing subsidies to buy private houses rather than just build enough public houses. I'd be interested in some economic insight into this if anyone has any.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/nov/08/private-surg...
a very tiny proportion of them yes, in the US the whole thing is private
The US has several public insurers.
About 72 million Americans are enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP.
About 60 million are enrolled in Medicare.
The MHS covers about 9.5 million people.
The IHS covers another 2.2 million people.
21% of US hospitals are government owned.
Scenarios range from completely free at the point of use, to 100% out of pocket, and everything in between.
The 5 programs I mentioned above are just the largest federal programs. States and localities in the US often implement their own programs. There are hundreds of government healthcare programs that someone in the US might take advantage of, depending on where they're at.
The problem with healthcare in the US is not that there is no government healthcare initiatives. The problem is that we have too many. Fragmentation is inefficient and expensive.
Governments in the US spend $4,854/person/year on healthcare. The NHS spends $4,192/person/year.
https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...
https://www.nhsconfed.org/resources/key-statistics-on-the-nh...
The majority of the world still has, to my knowledge, for-profit health care: Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland , Sweden and Italy all have at least some form of private health care.
The United States definitely have a problem with health care prices. It doesn't appear from where I sit to be an issue with individual bad actors (although of course they do exist) but rather structural. In part, the well-intended federal and state attempts to improve things have backfired — as they tend to do — and made things even more expensive (which reminds me of federal student loans, another instance of well-meaning attempts to help the lesser-off which somehow seem to benefit the upper middle classes most of all; cf. also federally-subsidised mortgages).